Page 13 of Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Sheriff

“I’m not mad at you, sweetheart.” The words come out low, aimed at the seam of the door. And I’m not even going to investigate where the term of endearment came from. “I need you to hear that. I’m not—none of that was you. I’m mad at myself, and I aimed it at you, and that’s a coward’s move and I know it.”

A long pause. Then, muffled: “You called me a distraction.”

“You are.” I close my eyes. “That’s the problem. Not you. Me. I made a bad call tonight because I was worried about you, and I’ve spent eleven years never making that call, and it rattled me. I should’ve sent Tate to close the crossings and stayed at command where I belong. Instead I’m out of commission when my people need me running point, and it’s nobody’s fault but mine.”

The door opens.

She’s got her arms crossed and her eyes are still a little wet, her face is blotchy. Still, somehow, she is the best thing I’ve ever looked at.

“I need you to hear me when I tell you that I’m not some incompetent moron who needs rescuing every other minute. I know that’s how my stupid watch has made it seem, but I’ve managed to take care of myself—alone, I might add—for nearly three decades. I don’t need a big grumpy man swooping in to rescue me because he thinks I’m too silly to take care of myself properly.”

“Is that what you think?” I ask.

“Obviously. Why else would I be a distraction?”

I step closer, allowing myself to loom over her. “You’re a distraction because all I can think about is when I can see you again. What new antic will allow me to help you with something? What adorable things will you say to me when I arrive and find you in an awkward situation? What would you do if I just showed up and kiss the hell out of you? That’s the kind of distraction I meant. I’ve never, for a second, thought you were incompetent.”

“Ohh,” she says.

“Yeah, oh.”

“I thought you didn’t like me at all,” she says.

“Quite the contrary.” I let my eyes drop to hover at her ample breasts that are stretching her graphic t-shirt. The shirt reads: Muscle Whisperer. I nod towards her. “What does that mean?”

“I’m a massage therapist.”

My first thought is to be a jealous motherfucker because the idea of her putting her hands on another man makes me feel a little crazy. But that’s not really me. I’ve never been the jealous type.

“Okay, Sheriff, then let me ask you something.” Her voice is steadier now. “What, exactly, can’t you do from here?”

“What?”

“Command point. Whatever that is. What is it you’d be doing at the station right this second that you physically cannot do in my house with a phone and a laptop?” She lifts a shoulder. “You’d just be sitting at a desk there instead of a table here, telling deputies what to do. So do that here.” Her eyes hold mine.

I open my mouth to argue with her, but she’s right.

“It is not your job to personally save every single person in this county with your own two hands. It’s your job to make sure that the word gets out so that people can do what they can to keep themselves safe. Those aren’t the same thing, and I think somewhere along the way,” she pokes me in the chest. “Somebody let you forget that.”

I look at her for a long moment.

Eleven years. Countless number of cases and victims. A whole ruined marriage—or rather a near marriage; we never did walk down that aisle. But yeah, I built my career on the idea that if I wanted a thing done right and done safe, I had to be the one doing everything. And this woman with her faulty watch and baked goods just took it apart in about four sentences.

“Get me the coffee,” I say, rough. “And the plate.”

Something moves across her face. Not quite a smile but very close.

“Now you want the cookies,” she says.

“Now I want the cookies.”

Half an hour later and I know exactly how you run a flood response from a small farmhouse at the end of Farm Road 12.

You put your phone on speaker on the kitchen table. You get your deputies checked in one by one—Tate on the barricades, Reyes coordinating with the fire crew, everybody accounted for. You call the county Emergency Operations Center, which Burton evidently put in place during his tenure as sheriff, and you stop trying to be the county EOC.

And you let the woman across the table, who will not sit still, who cannot sit still, make herself useful, because she’d combust otherwise.

Turns out the other thing Sheriff Burton did was to leave a list. Reyes emailed it to me. It’s a page of names, the folks out in the county who don’t trust phone alerts, won’t look at a screen, have to be called, by a human, one at a time, and talked through it. Miss Ada who’s ninety-one and won’t leave her cats. The Kowalskis with the trailer out near the lavender farms. And about a dozen more.