Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69537 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69537 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
So of course, when I saw her with a brick in her hand, across the parking lot from the car that I was in, at first I thought I was seeing things.
But then the woman lifted up the brick and brought it down hard on the passenger window.
My mouth fell open as she did it again and again, eventually breaking through the glass.
“What the hell?” I wondered as I said, “Come on, Boss.”
Boss followed as I loped across the parking lot.
She moved from the passenger window around to the driver’s window and started to go to town on that one next by the time I finally got to her.
“Bindi, stop!”
She didn’t.
“What the hell?” I heard yelled.
Delphine.
The alarm on the cruiser she was breaking into started to sound, yet she didn’t stop.
“Bindi, put the brick down,” I ordered.
She didn’t, instead reaching into the door and searching for the lock.
I caught her hand before she could scrape her hand against some glass and said, “Bindi, what the fuck? Stop!”
She struggled to get away from me, and I held her in place, hard and unforgiving.
“Calm the fuck down!” I ordered.
“Let me go! There’s a dog dying in here!”
I was so stunned that I did let her go.
I heard Delphine arrive just as she unlocked the back door and reached for the back door handle.
I was reaching my hand out to stop her when she got the door open and I saw the dog lying on the seat.
Rufus.
He was lying on the bench seat, barely breathing, and he had vomit all around him.
He was also lathered at the mouth, and my stomach instantly dropped.
“Help me get him out and under the shade,” she urged.
I did, picking the dog up and carrying him to the shade.
“You got a bottle of water?” she asked.
“No,” I grumbled as I placed Rufus down onto the grass underneath the one shady tree in the entire area.
“Find some,” she urged.
Just then, two homeless men came running up from the gas station across the street, and my belly tensed.
“Got some water!” he called out, holding up the two cold bottles. “You have to go back and pay for them, though. I just had to grab them. You might want to tell them I’m not stealing, too.”
I would.
I caught the bottle up with two fingers, then turned swiftly to Rufus.
“Me,” she said as she held out her hand to me, almost as if she knew he’d come straight to her. “I’ll use one to let him drink, and you use the other to pour on his head. Maybe that’ll help cool him down.”
The dog didn’t pick his head up from her lap, and my stomach sank even further.
When she wouldn’t even look at me, I knew that she was still riding her anger, so I backed away and walked to the cruiser to inspect it.
“Keys,” I said to Delphine.
She gave them to me with a glare.
I started the cruiser and frowned, noticing the check engine light that popped up onto the dash.
A light bulb dawned, and I realized what had happened at once.
“What the heck is going on here?” my mother asked as she and a few other officers came out from between two cruisers.
“This woman just smashed my cruiser open with a damn brick!” Delphine yelled, throwing up her hands and imploring my mother to take her side.
Now, I didn’t normally have a problem with Delphine. I didn’t necessarily like her, but I didn’t dislike her, either. She was just a fellow officer.
But I didn’t like what she was implying, as if Bindi was in the wrong for what she did.
Sure, she’d broken the windows on the cruiser, but she’d done it for a damn good reason.
“Just because you’re a police officer doesn’t excuse the fact that you locked your dog in a hot car!” she cried, gesturing wildly as a whole, but likely directed at Delphine.
“She didn’t know,” I promised. “She didn’t know that the dog was in here when the car turned off. There’s a check engine light on in the car, and when that turned on, the remote start turned off.”
“The remote start lasts for fifteen minutes, max,” she countered. “She fuckin’ knew it wouldn’t last that long!”
Delphine bowed up at Bindi’s words.
“I’ve been coming out here every fifteen minutes and starting it back up. I truly didn’t know.” Delphine tried to defend herself, but Bindi wasn’t having any of it.
She turned to where the two homeless men hovered. “How long have you been standing out here by this car?”
“An hour,” he answered. “We heard the dog from our shade over there.”
He pointed to the shade that was next to the gas station they’d just taken the water from.
I tried not to get mad that they knew that there was a dog suffering in a hot car and they didn’t want to come up and tell a police officer the problem.