Rude Awakening Read Free Page B

Lester Bodine, Sr himself. Dalton just didn’t believe in shooting animals. He got fired.
    Rigsby’s Five & Dime fired him because he couldn’t seem to get the price gun to work; and his table-waiting days at the Longbranch Inn concluded after he spilled a cup of coffee, two eggs over easy, grits and biscuits all over His Honor, the Mayor. There was a job at some place over in Bishop that I know didn’t last too long, and one in Taylor County that ended in him being asked not to come back that way anytime soon.
    It was a grave Clovis Pettigrew who practically begged the sheriff to hire Dalton after the retirement of Dale Morgan, who had dropped dead two days after retirement, which goes to show you either don’t retire period or you retire real early so you can enjoy it. Anyway, with great disquiet, the sheriff hired Dalton, mostly for answering the police band radio, which he took to real well. When the sheriff took him out to the shooting range, and gave his own personal gun to him to shoot, he saw that not only was Dalton a crack shot, he didn’t shoot a single civilian that popped up on the course. So he sent Dalton up to Oklahoma City for training and got him back six weeks later with a C average in everything but the shooting range, where he made straight A+s. He’s been a sworn-in Prophesy County Deputy Sheriff ever since.
    I stopped my ruminating and got back to my report, with my last thought on Dalton, ‘I hope the boy gets laid.’
    CHARLIE SMITH
    Charlie Smith liked his new job as police chief of Longbranch, Oklahoma. It beat the hell out of being a homicide detective on the Oklahoma City force. Oklahoma City might not be the biggest city in the country – hell, in the southwest – but it did have its fair share of killings, and although most of them were smoking-gun killings, Charlie didn’t believe in misdemeanor murder like a lot of his fellow officers. In fact, Charlie decided to leave the big city force before he got jaded, which was something he saw a lot in his fellow detectives. He wanted to move somewhere where not only was murder a rare thing, but it was also an important thing; a thing that made people sit up and take notice, cry on their neighbor’s shoulder and demand justice, no matter who was the victim or the perpetrator.
    So he was glad he’d moved to Longbranch, and so were Beth, his wife, and their two girls, Courtney, age nine, and Isabel, age six. The girls loved their new schools and their new teachers – where there had been thirty-three to a class in Oklahoma City, here in Longbranch it was more like 20/1, odds very much in his girls’ favor. And Beth, well, Beth just loved it. She’d joined the Methodist Church, something she hadn’t been part of since she was a kid, and had just about talked him into at least going. Charlie thought he might talk to the pastor first; he had a few thousand questions on the subject before he let himself get too involved. But best of all, now they were talking about maybe having another kid: that boy Charlie’d been wanting. Well, practice makes perfect, he thought with a grin.
    Charlie Smith had what his wife – and other women, truth be known – called a ‘shit-eating grin’, or, to put it more delicately, a ‘cat-ate-the-canary’ kind of smile. His teeth were a bit crooked, which somehow added to the charm started by his light brown, almost blond hair, shiny green eyes and tall, lanky, ‘I’m a cowboy’ body and stride.
    He pulled up to the pristine little three-bedroom, two-bath, two-car-garage house in the Meadowbrook Subdivision. White brick with gray-blue trim, the house had a wide, natural wood front door with beveled glass inlay. The little walkway up to the door had two blue pots with an abundance of pansies, and some ivy plants hanging from the little front porch. The yard, he’d noticed, had already been mowed and it wasn’t even