Read Cat's Claw (A Pecan Springs Mystery) for Free Online Page B

council. Hark Hibler would get an editorial out of it.
    And there were staffing consequences. Blake had been put on a desk while IA conducted a review, which meant that the night patrol unit was now short two officers, since one was already out on medical leave. Sheila had been fairly successful in beefing up the force to the point where they could cover court appearances and vacations, but illnesses and family emergencies were a different matter. Overtime was eating up the budget.
    So yesterday, she and Canady had gone over the duty roster, juggled assignments, and come up with a solution of sorts. It involved shifting an officer from Jeraldine Clarke’s day patrol unit to Canady’s night unit, and moving a rookie officer, Rita Kidder, from her training stint in Records to the day unit, where Clarke would be her field training officer. Nobody in the unit was eager to FTO a woman—and Sheila had already heard (gossip traveled at warp speed in Pecan Springs) that the officers’ wives were even less eager for their husbands to ride with Rita, who was young, bright, and shapely, although her shape was not quite so evident when she was in uniform. Women had been policing since 1910 and patrolling with the boys since the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act required state and local governments to adopt the 1964 Title VII rules. You’d think the old macho attitudes would have come unglued by now, wouldn’t you? Maybe that was true in big-city departments. Butnot in small-town Texas, where the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
    Sitting behind her desk now, Sheila smiled faintly, remembering her own FTO in the Dallas PD some fifteen years before. The two of them worked out of the West Dallas station, which wasn’t a picnic in anybody’s book. Orlando had been a burly twelve-year veteran with hands like hams and a fighter’s nose, ugly as sin. They hadn’t been in the squad car for more than ten seconds before he turned to her, stuck out his chin, and growled, “I’m gonna tell you this just once, Dawson, so you listen hard. I don’t like it that you’re riding with me, but I got no choice, I’m stuck with you for the next four weeks. So this is the way it goes down. I get in a fight, I wanna see your nose bloody. I get shot up, you better take a bullet. You aim to be a cop, you act like a cop, not like a damn girl. You got that?”
    She’d got it, knowing that it wasn’t just that she was a woman and slender, but that she was also blond and pretty. Being attractive, sexy, even, was something she had always viewed as an asset, like a fast-acting brain, the reflexes of an athlete, and good upper body strength. But she found out on her first day at the Police Academy that
pretty
definitely wasn’t an asset in police work. It gave her brother cadets (“brother”—that was a laugh) another reason not to take her seriously, and her sister cadets, the few there were, something to envy. By the time she graduated, she would have traded her looks for dark, stringy hair, sallow skin, and another three inches and twenty pounds.
    That first night on patrol with Orlando had been ordinary, even boring. Nothing happened until they got a 10-10, code for a fight in progress. It was in a dark, dirty bar and had already turned into a pretty decent brawl when they arrived. By the time she and Orlando got the three drunk ringleaders cuffed, the pair of officers who had been called in asbackup were standing there with their mouths gaping. Orlando had a bloody nose and a bite on one hand. But Sheila hadn’t been black belt in karate for nothing. She was unscathed, even though she’d taken down the two biggest guys by herself. And she only had to do it once. From then on, the word was out. “Dawson gets the job done, whatever it takes,” they said. “She does what she has to. She hustles.”
    She wasn’t one of the guys—Sheila knew she never would be
that
. She would always be an outsider, a woman in the biggest