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Holding her breath, she pushed the door open, still standing slightly to the side, her right hand resting on the butt of her sidearm, her heart rate picking up as she braced herself for something that didn’t happen.
The anxiety ebbed. She breathed again as she looked down the dark side hall. True to the name of the architecture, you could have shot a shotgun in the front door and not hit a thing on the way out the back door…which stood wide open.
A person emerged from the last room down the hall. A short body on skinny, wide-set legs, arms wrapped awkwardly around a good-size flat-screen TV as they hurried for the back door.
B’Lynn gasped and shouted, “Thief!”
“Stay here!” Annie ordered. She drew her weapon and hustled after the burglar. “Sheriff’s office! Stop right there! Stop!”
The thief continued out the door, off the back porch, and hung astaggering right, heading toward the house next door, struggling with the grip on the television, shouting, “I didn’t do nothing!”
“You’re stealing a TV!” Annie said, incredulous. “I’m looking right at you!”
The thief glanced back over a hunched shoulder to hurl an angry “Fuck you!”—a crucial mistake that threw momentum and balance out of alignment and sent him/her—Annie still wasn’t sure—into a drunken spiral that ended with a strangled cry and a thud. Like a character in a cartoon, the perpetrator fell backside-down, feet up in the air, dirty flip-flops flying off into the weeds, and lay moaning, trapped beneath the television like an upended turtle.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Annie grumbled, pulling her phone out of her pocket to call for backup.
“You’re under arrest,” she announced, looking down at the thief as she waited for the call to connect.
A woman, she decided, though it could have gone either way. Limp, shaggy dishwater-blond hair. A wide, flat face with the sunken features and bad skin of an addict. She struggled to get out from under the television, skinny arms and legs flailing. Shoving the TV off her chest, she revealed a bleached-out red Fuck Your Feelings T-shirt. Charming.
“Don’t you even think about getting up!” Annie snapped, pointing a finger in warning. Her call went through, and she identified herself and requested a deputy to come to the address.
“Where’s my son?” B’Lynn Fontenot demanded as she came off the porch and made a beeline for the thief. “Where’s Robbie?”
“How would I know?” Fuck Your Feelings grumbled, struggling to sit up, grimacing as she felt the back of her head.
“Please stand back, Mrs. Fontenot,” Annie said, stepping in her path. “I’ll ask the questions. Why don’t you take a seat on the porch?”
“I don’t want to take a seat,” B’Lynn snapped. “I want to know where my son is!”
“That’s my job to find out,” Annie said. “Please let me do it.”
She turned back toward the thief, who had begun to crab-walk backward toward the next house, as if she thought she might sneak away in broad daylight with a sheriff’s detective standing three feet away.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“You told me not to get up!”
“Are you high?” Annie leaned down, looking for dilated pupils. “Are you high right now?”
“No, but I wish I was,” the thief said belligerently. “You can’t arrest me for wishing!”
“I’m arresting you for stealing that TV.”
“It’s mine! I loaned it to that guy.”
“That’s a bald-faced lie!” B’Lynn shouted, pacing back and forth maybe ten feet away, arms crossed tight over her chest. “I gave that TV to Robbie. It came out of my guest room. I have the serial number at home.”
The thief made a face. “Who keeps the serial number for a TV?”
“You’re friends with the guy that lives here?” Annie asked. “What’s his name?”
“Uh…Donnie?”
“Wrong.”
“I call him Donnie.”
