Page 33 of The Harborer
“Negative, I’ll circle back solo. Will advise.” Shane ground his back molars. What if the SUV had rammed that tanker and set off an explosion?
Fuck!
Shane dragged his hand over his jaw, the obvious question niggling at him. Why had the asshole been running in the first place?
Back at the toss site, he parked his truck. He shrugged on his parka and donned the high-visibility vest stowed in his searchand rescue kit. After cramming on his beanie with the San Juan Sheriff’s Department insignia attached to it, he pulled out his flashlight and hailed Dispatch.
“Central, this is 431. I’m back at marker thirty-four, checking for discarded item.” He made a meticulous sweep of the embankment, but it was covered with thick brush so dark it obscured everything. He began descending its steep grade, shining the flashlight beam in a grid pattern as he searched for the item. Nothing. How could something that big and that light in color simply disappear?Same way a grown man can disappear in this shit.
The incline grew more steeped in shadows that seemed to swallow the beam. After ten more minutes of searching the slope, he stopped. The grade dropped straight down another fifteen feet, and he didn’t have the right gear to keep going. With weary reluctance, he spoke into the radio. “Negative contact. Drop area’s too steep and covered with too much brush to access safely right now. Marking GPS. Will flag for follow-up in better light. I’ll file in report.”
“Copy that, 431.” Donna paused before adding, “Stay safe out there.” In spite of himself, Shane smiled. Donna was the department’s den mother, and she was good at it.
After marking the area, he U-turned and headed back toward Fall River. On his way, he called Amy to let her know he needed to stop at the Sheriff’s Office, omitting the reason why. She still hadn’t heard from Micky.
When he walked into the office, Gunderson was manning the desk again. He narrowed his eyes at Shane and smirked. “Were you on a rescue, or have you been rolling around in the forest again?”
“Something like that.” Shane filled him in on the chase.
“Yeah, I heard a little bit about that. That’s close to my turf, so I thought I’d head over there when my shift here is over.”
Still picking pine needles and crunchy dead leaves from his hair and clothes, Shane grabbed himself a cup of lukewarm coffee and plopped into his creaky office chair at a battered deskin a row of similarly scarred desks and wobbly chairs. One would think that after ten years he could get an upgrade, but he’d stopped asking two years ago after hearing Sheriff Chesterton pontificate for the millionth time on the measly budget and citizens’ ongoing complaints about the levies that fed said budget. The work environment added to his list of gripes about working for a tiny department.
Checking his phone for the exact time, he settled in to file his incident report. It was four minutes past noon. Mountain Coffee would close in two hours, and he was going to be there, whether Amy planned on moving out of Micky’s today or not. She would need moral support, and he would be the guy who provided it.
He was almost done with his leftover coffee and halfway through typing his report when his phone buzzed with an internal call.
“Hey, O’Brien? Sheriff wants you in his office. Now,” Gunderson said.
Oh, for fuck’s sake! It’s my day off!
With a heavy sigh, Shane grabbed his notepad and headed down the hall, where he found the sheriff’s door ajar. He knocked anyway. “You wanted to see me, sir?”
“Close the door,” Chesterton barked without looking up from his phone.
Sheriff Rory Chesterton was a stout man in his late fifties, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair and a ruddy complexion. Though he wasn’t originally from San Juan County, hewasa Colorado boy, and folks around here liked him enough to keep re-electing him—or maybe his success hinged more on the fact no one else wanted the job. Shane had considered it fleetingly before shifting his ambitions toward different jurisdictions rather than roles in the same sheriff’s department. Besides, he would need more “seasoning” before the electorate found him worthy, and how did one get the experience in a town where elk in school parking lots and peeping raccoons were the usual complaints? Disappearing garage owners and mysterious SUV chases aside, of course.
A little unkempt at the moment, the Sheriff’s tie hung loose and his sleeves were rolled up, revealing tattooed Popeye forearms. His desktop was littered with paperwork and stacks of campaign mailers in a haphazard pile cluttering one side.
Finally, he looked up and leveled Shane with a scowl. Black bags smudged the undersides of his eyes. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in a week, though he’d acted plenty refreshed when he’d been glad-handing the muckety-mucks and flashing his politician’s smile at the Boarding Call yesterday. “I just got a call from a buddy on the highway board who heard about a chase on 550. You wanna tell me why I’m hearing about this from him and not you?”
Shane sucked in a silent, bracing breath. “I’m in the process of filing the report after working the scene.”And it’s my day off. “I was going to brief you when—”
Chesterton cut him off. “Save it. What the hell happened out there? Walk me through it, from the moment you spotted him, so I’m not left standing in the dark like a damn mushroom.”
Shane willed himself to keep his cool as he ran through the details.
Leaning back, the sheriff rubbed his jaw, the furrows deepening the creases lining his face. “Jesus. Seventy-one onthatroad? You know what that looks like this close to the November elections? We’ve got half the county bitching about tax levies and the other half mad we don’t patrol enough. Last thing I need is a headline about one of my guys chasing some junkie into a damn fireball.”
“I terminated the pursuit when it became unsafe,” Shane clipped. “There was no backup close enough, and I didn’t have a spike strip at my disposal.”
“Why not?”
“I was in my personal vehicle.” Chesterton gave him a blank stare. “It’s my day off.” When Chesterton still didn’t respond, Shane gritted out, “I followed policy, Chief.”
Finally, Shane’s words seemed to register, though Chesterton didn’t verbally acknowledge that Shane had worked on his day off. “No backup?” he said instead.
Backup wasneverclose enough in these wide-flung spaces, though usually guys didn’t need it. And if you were in this game long enough, it meant you damn well had the chopsandthe cojones to handle yourself alone out there.
