Page 95 of Hey, Daddy

“Good, then I’ll stay. There are too many kitties I didn’t get to see yet.”

I picked her up an hour later, fully covered in cat hair.

We stopped at her house for her to get showered.

While she was in the shower, Shasha stopped by with a grim look on his face.

He jerked his chin for me to go outside and said, “You’ll be getting your job back any second.”

“Why?” I asked in confusion.

“Because as of an hour ago, the senator’s dead by his wife’s hand.” He chuckled. “She found out—though it was by me—that her husband had played a part in the mistress’s death. That and the fact that he had a mistress. She lost her fuckin’ shit and shot him in the face. On national television.”

My mouth dropped open. “What makes you think that I’ll get my job back, though?”

“Because Sergeant Daniels tried to protect the dumbass and got a bullet to the face to show for it. She took out five of them before she went down herself.” Shasha laughed. “She told everyone, on live TV, everything that happened, and media coverage on that event was wild since it’s an election year.”

“Nice,” I said. “Anything you might want me to start looking into?”

Shasha’s eyes gleamed. “Oh, yeah.”

“No way!” Nastya cried, throwing her hands up.

“Yes, way!” my sister-in-law cried. “He totally mooned an entire congregation!”

“Seriously?” Nastya looked from Kendall to Benedict.

“Don’t look at me, that was him!” Benedict pointed at our brother-in-law, Kingston.

I grinned as I remembered that particular event.

We’d been at Kingston’s bachelor party, which wasn’t much of a bachelor party as a day of target shooting, drinking beer, and building a chicken coop for our sister, Caroline’s, wedding present.

Later that day, after five or six beers, Kingston had gone out to dump the plethora of beer cans we’d gone through that day, and a bus had stopped and scolded him for throwing them on the ground.

What they hadn’t known was that he was putting the glass bottles there for recycling to get, and he’d have dumped them in the box that they were supposed to go in, but the recycling company had taken his bin because it’d been broken.

They’d told him to put all the recyclables out by the road, and sure, they probably meant for him to put it into another container, but none of us had been thinking all that clearly that day.

We’d been hot, halfway drunk, and tired.

Needless to say, Kingston hadn’t taken their lecturing well, turned his back on them, and mooned them.

The police had been called, but I’d luckily been able to calm them down.

That didn’t mean that we didn’t still give Kingston all kinds of shit.

“I want a chicken coop for my wedding present,” Nastya said dreamily.

She was two glasses of wine deep, and it was very obvious that she didn’t handle her liquor well.

At least, not anymore.

I loved it.

She was much more talkative, and Mom, Caroline, and Kendall loved having drinking friends.

I didn’t think I ever saw Mom at a gathering without an alcoholic beverage in her hand.

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