Page 7 of Safe With Me

Mike had been nice to look at, like the Adirondack Mountains I’d passed on the highway before I’d taken the Kelly Lakes exit. Part of the town charm, but meant to be admired from a distance.

“Ready to get settled into your new apartment?” She smiled and twirled two keys around her finger. “I know you saw thepictures I sent, but it’s a great place. It’s a two-family house, and the owners are the cutest spinster sisters. Nosy, but very sweet and helpful. You have your own entrance and access to the yard if you want to lay out in the sun. The furniture is bare minimum, but you have a couch, a kitchen table and chairs, and a bed.”

“That’s all I need,” I said with a shrug.

Maybe if I did end up liking it here, I could add some pieces and make it my own.

But right now, I felt like a guest in my own life and a sudden nomad on the run.

I had a new everything—a new place to live, a new job and a whole new life.

Yet, nothing felt like mine.

2

MIKE

“Okay,”I said, blowing out a frustrated-as-fuck breath as I held out my arms in an attempt to keep two furious women far enough from each other. “Let’s just calm down.”

One was in her mid-eighties, and the other one was a spry seventy-five, but they were pushing against my hands and snarling at each other like two gray-haired pit bulls ready to pounce.

After almost thirty years as neighbors, one would think they’d learn to get along or at least tolerate each other. This feud had gone on for as long as I could remember and was ignited by the stupidest things.

“Well, Mikey, if she could keep that damn dog from barking all day and night, maybe I could get some sleep,” Mrs. Scarpullo, the older of the two, jabbed her finger at Mrs. Wagner as if she were reaching out to stab her.

“He doesn’t bark all day and night,” Mrs. Wagner spat out as she rolled her eyes. “You’re being dramatic. As usual. He barks when he sees something. He’s a watchdog, which is something I would think you’d appreciate for your own safety.”

“He’s a watchdog?” Mrs. Scarpullo huffed out a laugh. “What does he watch? Bees and flies buzzing around the weeds in yourgarden? The mailman? All he does is make noise and keep me up at night. Do something about it.”

Mrs. Wagner scoffed. “What would you like me to do?”

“Either keep him calm, buy a muzzle, or get rid of him.”

“Stop,” I said with enough irritation in my voice to make Mrs. Scarpullo rear back as if I’d taken a swing at her. Both women had known me for long enough to call me Mikey, and I guessed they still didn’t think of their old friend Rose Russo’s little grandson as an officer of the law. I half expected one of them to scold me for using that tone of voice.

But I had that problem with most people in town. It was an annoying circumstance of becoming a cop in the same town I’d grown up in. It had been an uphill battle to make longtime residents who’d once dropped candy in my pumpkin pail on Halloween view me as someone in a position of authority.

I’d moved out of town when I was only four years old and came back later as a teenager, but these women most likely still thought of me as the same little boy I’d been when I’d moved out of Kelly Lakes with my mother after my parents divorced. I was sure most assumed there was some tragic story as to why I’d come back to live with my father after years of only visiting him on the weekends.

I’d made Kelly Lakes home and blindsided everyone, especially my parents, when I’d told them right after my college graduation that I had signed up for the police academy and wanted to become a cop. My stepmother, Peyton, had been the only one able to look past her concern to congratulate me.

My mother and father had managed to agree on something for once in my life, each asking me what the hell I was thinking the second after I’d delivered my news.

I wasn’t sure what was worse. Knowing that my job, even though calls to this house were the most action I’d seen in a few days, was probably keeping my parents up at night, or that Mrs.Scarpullo and Mrs. Wagner, along with so many others in town, thought it was cute that little Mikey wore a police uniform now.

I was here almost every week, as one would always call the cops on the other. And although everyone knew everyone in this town, I was usually the one sent here to break it up since they were “family friends” and I was almost their neighbor, since my apartment was a few houses away from theirs.

Both of those connections had gotten me absolutely nowhere.

Most of the calls the station received were harmless, like this one. Bickering neighbors, squabbles over land space when someone would veer too far to the edge of a property or had the nerve to park in front of someone’s house, but cops were privy to a Kelly Lakes hidden from most of the residents.

I’d learned early on that even if a town seemed safe, it still had a dark side, just like everywhere else. I’d been as surprised as anyone to learn about it after I’d joined the KLPD.

Domestic violence calls to homes I never would have imagined had shocked me, especially when I’d witnessed how ugly it had become by the time we arrived. We had issues with residents dealing drugs here and there, although Keith, the chief of police and my father’s best friend, was always good about squashing that quickly.

He used nosy residents to his advantage, and even though he used us to watch the town, he’d walk around once or twice per week on different days as if he were a regular beat cop, “keeping the residents honest” since they never knew when the chief would pass by.

There wasn’t much anyone could get away with—at least not for very long—in a town this small with a police chief who made it his business to know everything that went on within town limits.

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