Rude Awakening Read Free

department. She had very short salt-and-pepper hair, glasses and a hawkish nose. And she ruled the roost at her house like nobody’s business – and had since Dalton’s daddy went out for a pack of cigarettes one night and never came back. ’Course, maybe she ruled the roost before that, too, which may have been why Dalton’s daddy left. And it looked like she was trying to rule the roost here now, too. The fact that this was definitely, and without question, Gladys’s roost didn’t seem to impress the lady much.
    My cousin Earl, gone now for some twenty-odd years, was a friend of Dalton’s daddy. I was in grammar school when they were hanging out, but I remember the elder Pettigrew well. Dalton is definitely a clone of his daddy: big and blond and not very bright; Dalton’s daddy should have been a football player but was too clumsy to do much. His name was Peter Pepperidge Pettigrew, known throughout the high school as ‘Threepee’. After high school he went away from Longbranch, coming back about a year later with wife, Clovis, and the first of the three Pettigrew children: Hawke, another clone of his daddy. Unfortunately, the middle child was a girl, Mary Ellen, and she, too, took after Threepee. That boy had some serious genes.
    Seeing me, Gladys said, ‘I’ve been telling her Dalton doesn’t come on duty til Monday!’
    â€˜That so?’ I said.
    â€˜That’s what the roster says!’ Gladys said, staring daggers at me and shoving the roster under my nose. Seeing as it was a Friday, and Gladys had initiated ‘casual Fridays’ a couple of years back, she was attired that day in stretch denim pants that covered what my nephew Leonard said was called ‘junk in the trunk’, which Gladys had a serious amount of, and a long-sleeved denim shirt that Gladys herself had appliquéd with multicolored spring flowers, yellow-and-black bumblebees and pink and purple butterflies. Her champagne blonde hair was curled in a tight new perm and her cheeks were as rosy as Max Factor could make ’em.
    I pushed the roster back a bit, so I could see what she was shoving under my nose, and looked. It definitely said Dalton was off today, through the weekend and not on again until Monday morning.
    I showed the roster to Clovis Pettigrew. ‘That’s what it says,’ I said.
    â€˜Well, that’s not what my boy told me!’ she said, hands on hips, scowl on face. Actually, I’ve never seen her face look anything other than how it did now, so maybe it wasn’t a scowl, maybe that was just the way her face looked. Or maybe she’d been scowling for so long, the wind changed and she now wore it permanently, just like my mama always warned me.
    â€˜He said he was coming in to work this morning?’ I asked, picking up real quick like, which is what a duly elected sheriff should do.
    â€˜He left yesterday evening, saying he had to work the night shift. Then when he didn’t come home this morning like he was supposed to, I got to calling his cell phone. And instead of talking to me, there was a message saying he had to work straight through to Monday. Some undercover thing!’ Clovis said.
    Uh oh, I thought. We don’t do undercover, and even if we did, I’d never use Dalton for such a thing. The boy wouldn’t be able to persuade a two-year-old that he was anything other than a cop.
    â€˜Ma’am,’ I said to Dalton’s mama, ‘let me look into this and I’ll get right back to you. I’ve got your number and I’ll give you a call.’
    Arms back across her chest. ‘No, I don’t think so, Sheriff,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll just wait here until you produce my son.’
    â€˜That’ll be kinda hard, Miz Pettigrew,’ I said, thinking fast. ‘With Dalton being undercover and all, I don’t want to blow his cover by calling him out too soon. If