Page 33 of Brewbies
Darby gave him a brittle smile and managed to remain upright until he disappeared back into the darkness. Only once he’d faded into whatever mist superheroes were always fucking off into did Darby allow herself to swoon onto the bench that he had occupied so stealthily.
If he only knew.
SIX
Head
“Rhododendrons can suck my desert-dwelling dick,”Deputy Trent McGarvey muttered as he deadheaded another pink-gone-brown blossom as if it’d insulted his voluptuous mother.
Ethan gritted out a sound of mirth but didn’t add any complaints.
Much as Deputy McGarvey, a city-born former MMA fighter, hated donning gardening gloves on his off-hours, Ethan loved it.
The best part of being a sheriff was the community outreach. So many officers put too much stock into the “protect” part of their creed. Why there wasn’t a better emphasis on “serve” in this country made no fucking sense. Establishing that a community leader was willing to serve made the protecting part a hell of a lot easier. In his experience, anyhow. Ethan lived for emergency preparedness mock training, for tsunami drills and anti-bullying assemblies at local schools.
And every spring, he looked forward to Deadhead Sunday, a Townsend Harbor holy day where Townsendites, from Water Street, to uptown, to the lighthouse and the state parks, all put on their gardening gloves and clipped the damp and dying rhody blossoms from their intensely green bushes.
After, a beer tent and food trucks appeared like magic, and the town called in some incredible band from across the Puget Sound in Vancouver or Seattle for the Concert on the Docks.
The docks being the three wide piers along the boardwalk where cruise ships on their way to Alaska mingled with the occasional celebrity yachts to unload their shoppers—er—tourists to Water Street’s several blocks of shops, galleries, pampering, and eateries.
“I like to do something physical on Sundays,” he replied carefully. “And the more people see us willing to help, the more likely they are to come to us when they need it.”
Ethan thought he might have seen a little admiration before McGarvey rolled his eyes. “You’ll have to understand if my people aren’t as enthusiastic about mandatory gardening.”
Hesitating, Ethan straightened. Something he didn’t even consider when handing out an invitation for obligatory labor to a Black man.
“Know what else can suck my dick?” McGarvey continued, his bad mood picking up steam. “Azaleas, hyacinths, lilacs, and whatever the fuck these puffballs are that keep sticking to my legs. And those goddamn proselytes damaging my calm.”
“Met Pam and Janet, did ya?” Ethan chuckled before bending over to discard a rock he’d dug up. He’d been wondering where the town’s sandwich-board-toting, end-of-days-fearing, Bible-verse-spouting contingent of old and wooly women had been.
Festivals were like their Super Bowl.
“They refused to pull the weeds by the weed bakery,” McGarvey marveled, as if Ethan might be hearing this for the first time. “Said they were afraid of the ‘devil’s lettuce’ and that the metaphysical shop owner kills small animals and, after her satanic rituals, fertilizes the marijuana with their corpses. I poked around, and all I found were a few composted eggshells and some fluff that looked suspiciously like one of Kevin Costner’s hairballs.”
“Welcome to Townsend Harbor.” Ethan sighed as he remembered just how fucking relentlessly “Pammit and Jamela,” as the dispatcher, Judy, called them, clucked at him.
Not half so much as they did the town police, but seventy times more than they should. Not only that, but they also made it their self-appointed mission to rouse the rabble whenever they felt a witch needed to be burned.
McGarvey hadn’t finished his tirade. “It took all my training not to tell them how much they can fuck the hell off.”
Ethan grunted from where he curb-stomped his shovel into the ground. “So can whoever put this sign here.”
It was several months until election day, and already someone had broken a hundred-and-fifty-year unspoken truce by putting up a political sign on Water Street turf. Politics tended to slam tourist wallets shut, and that was a fact any side could agree on.
KIKI FORRESTER FOR SHERIFF
Any other name and he’d have fed the sign to a trash compactor.
“Who’s tryna have a sheriff named Kiki, anyhow?” McGarvey asked. “That’s like naming your kid Billy Boband expecting them to be president someday. Though…way things are going…”
Ethan made a motion for his newest deputy of eight days, a transplant from Tacoma by way of Albuquerque, to keep his voice down. “Her name is Kikisoblu Nootka Rose Forrester, after Chief Seattle’s daughter.”
“That’s different, then.” Trent’s granite eyes gleamed with only half a sense of humor and the other half a wince. “Wait. Please tell me she’s not some new-age white lady.”
A snort escaped Ethan when he thought about how many of those white ladies McGarvey was going to have to deal with. How many of them would chase him with Sadie Hawkins intensity.
“Her brother is right over there.”
