Fireball (Cheap Thrills 1)

“You’re not using the words correctly, so yeah I’m going to correct you because you sound dumb. Nowhere in any dictionary will you find that you can use the word drug in place of the word dragged. Nor is it proper to say shook instead of shaken. If you can’t speak it properly, don’t speak at all,” she challenged, leaning into Mrs. Keating and miming zipping her lips up.

Why wasn’t I saying anything? Because it was taking everything in me not to lose my shit.

“You’re a shriveled up old bitch, Joan Bane,” Mrs. Keating shrieked, her whole body shaking with it. Then again, if you were her age and weighed roughly one hundred and ten pounds, yours would probably do the same thing I guess.

Watching the two gearing up for another round, I sighed and stepped forward. “Ladies, you’ve both said your piece, so why don’t you go your separate ways and…”

“Sheriff, I’m only helping her when I correct her,” Mrs. Bane waved in Mrs. Keating’s direction. “She has the vocabulary of a two-year-old most of the time, and then you add on her misuse of the English language… the woman needs help.”

“It’s the right words,” Mrs. Keating shouted back at her. “Isn’t it, Sheriff?”

Closing my eyes and taking a deep breath, I counted to five. When that didn’t help, I shoved my hands in my pockets and counted for another five beats. That’s when I made my choice on what I had to do. If I didn’t say what I needed to, the chances were that I’d be called out here again later, or tomorrow if I was lucky and they left it that long to pick the argument back up again. To avoid that, I was going to have to go with agreeing with one of them.

“They’re actually vernacularisms,” I sighed. “What you’re using them for is incorrect.”

Mrs. Bane nodded smugly while Mrs. Keating looked at me like I’d just sold my soul to the devil. Was it that big of a deal what words they used? No. But I was sick and tired of getting called out to Bates Retirement Home to deal with arguments like this. It was wasting a lot of man hours every week when the staff could be dealing with it instead of standing around looking at Facebook or whatever they were doing. At least the two women that worked here who I avoided like the plague after my last call out when they both tried jumping me in the hallway, Pamela and Rinna, weren’t here.

“They’re what?” Mrs. Keating asked.

“They’re vernacularisms,” I repeated. “They’re only used in an area. Every area has some, in fact every country has them so it’s not unusual for things like this to happen. But in this case, your use of the words is definitely incorrect.” Changing my focus from Mrs. Keating to Mrs. Bane I added, “That said, does it really matter what way she uses them seeing as how she’s not the only person to use them like that?”

Both of the women’s mouths open and closed a couple of times, and then like someone flipped a switch on inside Mrs. Keating her she-devil reared its head again.

And that’s how I arrested an eighty-eight-year-old woman during my lunch break.Fifty-seven minutes later…

“Sheriff,” Rory called from her desk as I walked past it. “Raoul says old man Beck called him on his cell to report a strange car parked in the drive of the Joseph’s old house. You know, the flower one on…”

“The corner of Grove Lane,” I finished, wishing today would just end. “I told him not to give that old man his cell number, but did he listen?”

Old man Beck had taken to calling the station four times a day at least. A cat shitting in his grass. A car he didn’t recognize driving down the road he lived on, probably casing the joint. Finding a bag he didn’t recognize as one of his own in his garbage can. The time he found a limb in his garden the day after Halloween. It had turned out that the cat was his wife’s, the car was his neighbor’s new car, the bag had been his wife hiding that she was throwing out his old shirts before she died, the limb was a Halloween prop that a kid had thrown… it was a pain in the ass, but we attended no matter what.

The limb incident had happened shortly after Raoul had joined us. He’d felt sorry for the old guy and his claims that we never took anything seriously or cared about what crimes were being committed even though we answered and investigated all of them, so he’d given him his cell number. Now, all the calls went to him and he was meant to deal with them himself.

Looking around, I couldn’t see the man in question. “Where’s Raoul? Why isn’t he doing it?”