Someday Never Comes

Chapter Seventeen

"That was one hell of a show you just put on."

The front door of the Sheriff's Office closed behind me with the snick of well maintained hardware and a backdraft of hot air.

Just inside the door a not so well maintained window AC unit rattled away, filling the room with an arctic breeze and the smell of mildew. It was a cavernous space, the converted lobby of an old bank maybe. With its high ceiling and lack of bullet proof plexiglass barriers, it clearly hadn't been built for anything resembling its current purpose.

"Mr. Wallace," removed from her audience Young was once again the cool authoritarian. "Why don't we have a seat in my office, be civil about this."

"Hard pass."

"Christian-"

"The name shtick only works for de-escalation if you have the chops to make it sound natural. You don't, Ortlinde," I said, shooting a meaningful look at the peel and stick scrawl on the glass of her office door.

I weighed the pros and cons of putting her head through it, distantly aware that sometime between leaving the alley and climbing the Sheriff Office's front steps, I had flipped over into full, calculating lizard brain.

The realization only served to further piss me off. I didn't like this guy. I had spent every single day since the Vavra's car had taken that header of an interstate offramp, actively trying not to be this guy.

Eyeing me from under the brim of her hat Young rested her hip against the corner of what looked like a reception desk. There was no receptionist though. No deputy dipstick either. He'd disappeared sometime after her post-put-out-the-dumpster break with reality and I hadn't seen him since.

Still not breaking eye contact she cocked back a shoulder, spread her hands; another of those non-verbal hat tricks that a bunch of guys with PhDs had decided could dissuade a person from clocking you.

"Try and look at this from my side of the table," she continued as if I hadn't spoken.

Apparently she'd been in the bathroom for the whole 'make them feel heard' portion of the seminar.

"A young man with your background, your credentials. You show up here and for some unfathomable reason, you stay. And now that you're here all of these strange things start happening. I'm just trying to understand."

"No," I shot back, 'my shit' officially lost. "You're posturing. You're making baseless allegations in front of the townsfolk." I stabbed a finger at her. "You're throwing around blame to distract from the fact that you and your sidekick have a burgeoning serial arsonist on your hands and clearly neither of you have the slightest idea what to do about it."

Silence.

Young, who'd made no move to speak during my tirade, blinked. Once, twice, and then, inexplicably, did the very last thing I'd been expecting. She started to laugh.

"You know," she said, once she'd recovered herself. "Your lieutenant said you were a self important little prick. I was thinking that was just some sort of personal grudge talking, but clearly you were just out of practice."

Half an hour earlier, some part of that would have stopped me dead in my tracks.

It had been a long half hour.

"Well," I sneered. "You have been busy."

"And you say that like you wouldn't have done exact same thing in my place."

"Oh, I'd have saved myself the time. I'd have used some deductive reasoning instead."

Oh yeah, diplomacy had definitely broken down.