Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 71226 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 356(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71226 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 356(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
As I waited for her to get back to me, I studied the outside of the vehicle.
It was a black Toyota Tacoma with so much dirt on it that it was nearly obscuring a couple of numbers on the license plate.
As I studied the car, the window of the driver’s side rolled down, and the driver put the credit card into the machine to pay.
I studied the driver with a critical eye.
I expected a man to be driving, but the arm that reached out belonged to a woman.
A very small, very tattooed, very dry-skinned looking woman.
The skin was so tanned that it looked like the woman went to a tanning bed every single day for hours on end.
I’d bet my left nut that the woman was a pack-a-day smoker.
Just as that thought occurred to me, the woman flicked a cigarette butt out of the window toward a Sonic carhop that was heading to another car.
She had to sidestep to avoid getting hit.
I gritted my teeth and added yet another citation to the growing list that was already taking place in my head.
“No outstanding warrants,” the dispatcher said. “Though there are several notes in here about the woman.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Argumentative with the police?”
“You got it,” she said. “Want backup?”
Did I?
I didn’t think I needed it, but sometimes it was better safe than sorry.
“Who’s close?”
“Black’s down the street eating lunch,” she said. “Mance is just down the road, too. Faith and Colliery are on a call.”
I grimaced.
I wasn’t interrupting Black’s lunch if I didn’t have to. And I couldn’t stand Mance.
“I’ll be okay,” I said. “Thanks, darlin’.”
I didn’t actually know the dispatcher’s name.
It was some grandma name that she’d told me a hundred thousand times, and I felt bad that I couldn’t remember it. So I always called her “darlin’.” We both knew that I didn’t know and pretended like I did.
I was really bad at names, and it took an act of God to get me to remember one.
“Be careful, Gentry,” she ordered in her grandmotherly voice.
I got out, my ticket book already in my hand.
We usually went digital with our tickets, but of course, today was not our day.
The system had gone down around noon and had stayed down for the last two hours.
So we were back to paper tickets and filling out notes by hand until the system was back up.
Even worse, with the system being down, we were also kind of flying blind on the warrants thing.
To the best of the dispatcher’s knowledge, there wasn’t a warrant. But that system was outdated and clunky. It wasn’t always the most reliable, and the offline version was like reading half of what was actually in each person’s file.
“Do you know why I pulled you over?” I asked as I walked up to the open car door window.
The woman who’d started a new cigarette the moment she threw the old one out blew out a puff of smoke in my direction before answering, “Isn’t that your job, Officer? To know why I was pulled over?”
The woman was in her fifties. She was short, scrawny, and I was right. She looked like she lived in the sun.
The carhop came back with a bag of food for the bitch in the truck and I pointed at a table behind her. “Just sit it there until we’re done with this traffic stop. Thank you.”
The woman didn’t argue, setting it on the table just beyond the woman in the car’s reach.
The chain smoker narrowed her eyes at me. “That’s my food.”
“Sure is,” I said. “And you should’ve waited to order it. In the meantime, I need your license and registration.”
She rolled her eyes and handed them both to me.
The license was almost orangey yellow, likely from the amount of smoke that was caked onto it.
I eyed the license.
Expired.
The registration was out, too.
“Both of these are expired,” I told her.
She smiled. “They’re not. I just never got the new tags and license.”
My ass.
“You were going fifty in a thirty-five,” I said. “I’m writing you a ticket today for that, as well as the expired tags, the expired license, and the littering.”
“What littering?” she asked in outrage.
I pointed at the cigarette butt.
“You can pick that up when you go get your food,” I said as I headed back to my car with her license.
I called the information in to the dispatcher, who didn’t have much to add seeing as she’d already given me everything she could scrounge up about the car owner.
I finished writing all the tickets, then went to hand them back to her.
I saw she’d gotten up to get her food, but not the cigarette butt.
“You forgot to get your trash,” I said as I handed the tickets to her. “Sign them and hand over the back copies.”
The woman rolled her eyes, signed them, then went back to eating her hamburger.