How About No
Page 29

I growled low in my throat. “I can do the job.”
I needed to do the job.
Having to deal with petty crime reports would literally kill me.
“That may be true,” my chief agreed, sounding tired. “But until you’re back on your feet officially, and have a release from a doctor, you’re on desk duty. You’re also on vacation for the next two weeks. Go home.”
Knowing when I wasn’t going to get what I wanted, I stood. “Fine. But don’t expect me to be nice to these people that come in here thinking that they’re gonna play tattle on Tommy, their neighbor who let their dog shit on their lawn.”
With that, I left the chief’s office and went out to my truck, annoyed all over again that my officers were a bunch of pussies.
I knew when I signed up to be the sergeant of all these little twits that it was going to be tough. I just didn’t realize how tough.
God, they were the whiniest bunch of grown men I’d ever had to deal with.
To make matters worse, I was supposed to return to work in two days before meeting with the chief. Now I have two more weeks before I can return.
It’d been a week since Hoax had called to tell us that Landry’s place—the one that we’d built when we were three months into our marriage—had burned to the ground.
And during that time, we hadn’t made any progress in finding out who did it. At this point, we were leaning toward a gaggle of teenagers that’d been caught setting fires to mailboxes a few streets down from our home.
But, after listening to their confessions, I couldn’t see them doing it.
They were scared and adamant that they hadn’t been on that street.
Of course, if I’d heard that the house burned down after I had set the mailbox on fire, I would’ve denied it, too.
My gut, however, told me that there was something more going on than I was aware of, and I planned to find it out what it was.
Starting now, seeing as I was still on medical leave, I would have plenty of time to do whatever the fuck I wanted.
But first…I wanted to go see Landry.
Stopping by her favorite place to eat, I grabbed two street tacos and a basket of fries for her along with five street tacos and a basket of fries for me, and then headed to the daycare.
When I pulled up outside and shut the bike off, I marveled at how good it felt to be able to stop by here with lunch again. Hell, this used to be something I did almost daily seeing as I almost always got an hour for lunch, so why not spend that hour with her since she had to eat, too?
We’d take our lunches to the park bench across the street from the daycare, and we’d watch all the ducks swim and fish jump while we spoke about nothing and everything.
The wailing scream of an infant as the door to the daycare opened dragged me from my thoughts, and I stiffly got off my bike.
My leg—although not worse—certainly wasn’t completely healed. But, it seemed the antibiotics were working since the infection had stopped spreading according to the doctor, so at least that was something.
He guesstimated that it would be about four more weeks until there was no more persistent pain, and about six weeks until I could return to light exercise.
“Hey, man.” I turned to find Bayou waving.
I gave him a wave back, but he didn’t stop and neither did I, both of us on our own missions.
He was dressed for work—he was the warden at a medium-security prison just outside of town—and looked like he was in a hurry.
Snatching up the food bags from my saddlebags, I waved to the woman who was obviously taking her sick kid home—the vomit on the kid’s shirt was a dead giveaway—and headed inside.
I found my wayward woman in the kitchen washing her hands. Her sad, brown paper-bagged lunch sat on the counter next to a bottle of half-finished water.
She looked tired today.
Although that was probably because I’d kept her up late doing things to her that I hadn’t been able to do in quite a long time…such as rolling over and lifting her leg in the middle of the night and taking her.
“Hey,” I called out softly.
Landry’s head snapped up, and a wide smile filled her face. “Hey! What are you doing here?”
I sighed as I remembered exactly why I was there. “My chief said that I was taking my bad mood out on all the officers under my command and that I needed to take another two weeks mandatory medical leave to get my head on straight so that I was in the right frame of mind before I came back to work for desk duty.”
She snickered. “Oh, I bet you just loved hearing that.”
I rolled my eyes and gestured to the bag with a tilt of my chin. “You have time to eat some lunch with me?”
Landry grabbed her lunch and stuck it in the fridge with what looked like the kids’ afternoon snacks.
“Anything is better than a boring ol’ sandwich,” she teased.
I snorted. “I’ve been telling you that for years now.”
She shrugged and batted her eyelashes at me. “Let me go tell Mindy I’m taking my lunch.”
Landry dashed down the hall and I stopped at the office, placing our food on the desk while I searched for a cord to plug my phone in while we were eating.
My hand hit the mouse, and I glanced at the computer.
Facebook was pulled up, and Landry’s Old Dogs New Tricks Rescue page was up, and the browser tab was blinking indicating she’d gotten a new message or notification.
Landry found me digging through her drawers.
“It’s plugged into the wall by the filing cabinet,” she said, gesturing toward the corner.
I saw the cord and went for it while saying, “You got a message.”
I felt her move behind me, her ass brushing mine as I bent over and reached for the cord on the ground.
Grinning, I plugged my phone in and placed it on the cabinet before turning around.
My eyes went to Landry’s angry face, and I stilled.
“What’s wrong?” I asked as I got a good look at her face.
Landry’s eyes flicked up to me, and she threw her arms up in the air and gestured at the computer, a disgusted look on her face. “When I first found out about Capo, there was this other chick who wanted him as well. Unfortunately, my qualifications and accommodations, as well as experience with working with abused animals, made me better qualified to take the dog. The woman was pissed, and she hasn’t stopped harassing me on Facebook since. I’ve blocked her twice, but she just makes a new profile with a different email address and bam, the harassment starts all over again. Since my dog rescue page is public, anyone can message me. But it’s getting to the point where I’m running out of options, and I don’t know what else to do.”
I moved to where I could see the screen and read the messages, feeling my shoulders get tighter and tighter at the venom in the woman’s words.
“Why is she so mad?” I asked in confusion, setting the phone back down on the counter.
“She’s mad because apparently her son, who was in the military and is now wheelchair-bound due to the injuries he sustained, wanted the dog. That’s all I have,” she explained.
“Huh,” I paused. “What was the first name she talked to you under?”
Landry did some clicking and then maneuvered herself into her list of blocked people. It was quite a hefty list.
“Are these all her?” I questioned.
“Yep,” she said. “If they come to my other box, I normally just block them straight away. But this time she was smart and started in with a short story about her dog that she wanted to see about getting hospice care for. Once she had my attention, she switched to ranting about what an awful person I was for stealing a dog away from a veteran.”
“This was the first name she messaged me from.” Landry pointed to a name.
I crossed back to my phone and shot a quick text to a buddy who was good with finding shit on people and then touched the top of Landry’s ear. “Let’s go eat, baby. We’ll worry about this later, okay?”
She sighed and stood up. “Sure. I hope you got me extra sauce. You know I like it hot.”
The look I gave her caused her cheeks to flush.
I bared my teeth. “I know you like it hot, darlin’.”