Nighthawk by Monroe Alan

Author:Monroe, Alan [Monroe, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2015-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

Wednesday, May 15 1:00 p.m.

Undersheriff Howard Thomas typically spent the last half hour of his workday removing every file from his desk and organizing them neatly inside one of the six filing cabinets in his office. Pencils and pens belonged in his center desk drawer or in the Seattle Seahawks coffee cup near the phone. He used a yellow legal pad to create a list of no less twenty tasks to taken care of before noon the next day. The basket on his desk marked “in” had been emptied at least two hours prior to the end of his work day, and he personally made sure any item in the “out” box was either picked up or delivered to the appropriate location. When he returned to his office by six the next morning, the office was immaculate except for a half a dozen papers stacked inside his “in” box.

Sixty hours after the early morning planning session with Davis and Hugh, Thomas had file folders stacked on his desk two feet tall not to mention seven different piles of folders scattered across the floor. The shattered remains of the Seattle Seahawks mug lay on the floor in the corner, and he could not locate a single pen besides the one in his hand. A mound of crumpled yellow paper overflowed from the metal trash can next to the desk; the “in” box on the corner of his desk contained a stack of papers twelve inches high.

The red marks on his jaw and right ear boar tiny indentations that matched the holes in his telephone. He spent the entire first day trying to find someone in the state forest service who knew the placement of deputies and volunteers from any specific county. Four hours of phone calls to state bureaucrats lead him to a round of calls with the National Forest Service and then back to the state forest service. Thomas explained Okanogan’s desperate situation, without using the term “Bigfoot”; but no matter who he talked to they responded with a description of just how desperately they needed more men to contain the blaze.

At six o’clock in the morning on the beginning of his third day of phone calls, he finally managed find a phone number for a mobile kitchen unit where fifteen of Okanogan’s deputies sat down much needed meal. The ranking deputy only spoke to Thomas for a total of five minutes before all fifteen men left the mobile kitchen and returned to their home county much to the disappointment of the forest service who threatened to file a formal complaint against the sheriff’s department in Okanogan.

Thomas’s old swivel chair creaked as he leaned back; he ran his hand through the remains of his hair and let out a tired sigh. Thomas stood up and walked out the back door of the sheriff’s department and looked at the mobile command unit. Before Davis took office, tall grass and a bit of loose gravel covered the parking lot behind the sheriff’s office, but under Davis’s leadership the area had been paved, neatly organized and fenced in.

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