No Quick Fix (Torus Intercession 1)

“Spiders hibernate just like bears,” Thomas told him through the cracks in the door as I took the key Mrs. Velazquez gave me and opened it up.

He couldn’t have been more than sixteen.

I turned to look at Thomas. “I thought black widows went into hyper-toxic mode during the winter and spit blood. Are you sure they hibernate?” I asked him seriously, brows furrowed, really playing up the confusion for the kid’s benefit.

The kid ran screaming from the yard, and Mrs. Velazquez gave me a big smile. “Spitting blood?”

“He had no idea.”

She snickered, her lovely face infused with mirth. “No, he didn’t.”

“You call us—I mean, Sheriff Thomas here—if he comes back, all right?”

“I certainly will,” she said, beaming at me. “Can I get your number?”

“Mrs. Velazquez,” I said, winking back at her, “you gonna call me day and night?”

“Mostly night,” she told me with a leer.

“Anytime you call, I’ll get right over here.”

“Do you like pumpkin cheesecake?”

“I certainly do.” I sighed, unable to stop smiling at the adorable, and incorrigible, flirt of an older woman. She had to be eighty if she was a day.

Back in the sheriff’s cruiser, I looked over at him when he didn’t immediately start the car up. “Are you all right? Did you forget where we were going? Did you have a stroke?” His scowl made me snort out a laugh.

“How old do you think I am, Calder?”

Turned out he was just as funny as Mrs. Velazquez.

We drove around together for a couple of hours, talked about the town and Mr. Cahill and about Peter Bannon, the man who’d been killed.

“So you don’t think there are actually any rare earth elements on Emery Dodd’s land?”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t. I think if there were any of that up here it would have been found years ago or, as Mr. Cahill said, whatever’s there is too small to support the cost of the drilling.”

“Then why do you think Bannon was killed?”

“I don’t know, but I think it’s something I’m not seeing; though lately, that’s not too hard to imagine.”

“Why would you say that?”

He sighed deeply. “I allowed Cahill to saddle me with a part-time deputy who we pay as a full-time one because I wanted to make the pillar of our community happy.”

I shrugged. “There’s an election coming up. There’s no certainty Reed will win. How many other candidates are there at the moment?”

“None, and that’s the problem. I want to retire, but I don’t think I can. I refuse to leave this town in Reed’s hands.”

I couldn’t very well blame him.

We stopped for Mexican food for lunch, and I was surprised at how good it was. I’d grown up in San Diego, so I knew what I was talking about. Afterward, Thomas had to go pick up his wife and run her over to her book club before he went to check on a pet adoption event at the park. He dropped me at Jenny Rubio’s house on the way.

She had a whole group of neighbors helping her clean up, hang her new front door, and do some spackling and painting around the house. I got right to work after she hugged and kissed me, followed by her daughter doing the same. She told me she had started seeing a therapist and I told her how thrilled I was to hear it. Her mother, who lived in Helena, was moving in with them, and it was great to meet her. She squeezed my face really tight when she thanked me for saving her daughter and granddaughter from her monster of an ex-son-in-law.

“What if he comes back once he gets out?” Jenny asked me.

“Then you’ll call me,” I told her, reciting my number so she could put it in her phone.

I saw her exhale all her fear, utterly certain I would protect her, and I had my own stab of worry about how I would go about doing that once I went home, but the director of the Ursa Women’s Shelter, Megan Farraday, who was on Emery’s board of directors at Darrow, was there helping out, and she and I had a nice talk about her excellent relationship with the Whitefish Police Department.

“They’ll come running if you’re not here,” she assured me.

I didn’t like the idea of the delay. “Well, I’m here now, and I run twice a day, so I’ll check on her when I do.”

She was smiling at me. “And who knows, Mr. Calder, you just might end up staying. I’d love to have our group endorse you for sheriff.”

I squinted at her. “Ma’am, I live in Chicago.”

“For now.”

For now? They were all nuts. “I’m sure you’ll find a wonderful candidate for sheriff.”

Her eyes were locked on me. “Yes, Mr. Calder, I’m sure we will.”

All of them were seriously insane.

Olivia called me when I was on my way home, having left Jenny Rubio with more people than she actually needed, and asked me to please come to the craft fair and pick her up because she wanted to go home but her father was stuck there and couldn’t leave.