A Fearsome Moonlight Black by David Putnam

Author:David Putnam [David Putnam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Level Best Books
Published: 2022-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Five

Two weeks went by in a flash. I loved patrol. Life got back to normal just like the lieutenant said it would. I made four more felony arrests, one from a call and three from car stops: one gun, one for Mexican brown heroin, and one for possession of stolen property—power tools taken in a burglary. What Johnny said was true, I loved hunting the bad guys. If at the end of the shift I didn’t have a felony arrest, I stayed out a little longer. One of those times the watch commander got me on the secondary frequency and told me to bring the car in so the next shift could go out. I took the subtle hint and after that I came in on time; the anxiety of not having a felony arrest at the end of the night worked on me like an itch I couldn’t scratch.

On my days off I took Beth to dinner and the movies. In no time I was close to maxing out the four-hundred-dollar limit on my one and only credit card. I’d trimmed my budget down until moths flew out of my wallet whenever I opened it. I’d have to make another run to Mom’s pantry. I’d been putting it off. Responsible adults didn’t conduct pantry raids on their parental unit’s home.

I also made regular stops at the police station on my morning runs to pilfer the stale donuts in the breakroom. I stocked up on boxes of mac and cheese, the off-brand, twenty-five cents per. I tried to fool Astro with some second-rate dog food, but he’d have none of it. He went on a hunger strike, the little butthead. He was actually eating better than I was. He didn’t feel bad for me. I could read the look on his cute little mug, saying I was the one with the girlfriend so suck it up, buttercup. Even so, life was grand, better than it had ever been.

Except some late nights after swing shift. If I wasn’t tired enough and couldn’t fall right to sleep, I stayed up and watched reruns of Cheers, and MASH, not looking forward to confronting the people who populated my dreams—night terrors: Dan Howard, Elmo, Franklyn Shearer, and Elise Stoner. I’d tried to lock them in that closet in my mind like Johnny said, but for me, it didn’t work that way. Not yet.

I had let the investigation into Cole Adler drop and I didn’t follow up on the Bamboo Hut lead. I felt a little guilty, but Beth never mentioned it again. I didn’t let the search for Jessica DeFrank die off, though. I continued to look for her in between hunting bandits and felons. To no avail. She had simply disappeared, and the case cleared as “a runaway, no suspicious circumstances.”

Two weeks after I’d begun dating Beth, Mom invited us for dinner on my next day off. A big test. Mom was a little eccentric and hard to take sometimes. If Beth could get along with Mom, well…

Now I didn’t mind beat one as much.

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