Read In The Bleak Midwinter: A Special Agent Constance Mandalay Novel for Free Online Page B

features, she said, “Wait…
You’ve always said you weren’t going to ask her until…”
    He nodded as her voice trailed off. “Yeah, I
know. That’s the other thing. I got the call last week.”
    “Seriously?”
    “Uh-huh. I start the academy in KC with the
next class. Just a few months from now. And I should have a job
waiting for me when I graduate.”
    “Oh my gosh, Skip! That’s fantastic!
Congratulations! Does Sheriff Morton know?”
    A gruff voice came from across the room
behind her. “Do I know what?”
    Clovis swiveled her chair and glanced over
her shoulder at the sheriff, who was several feet away and in the
process of emptying the dregs from a drip coffeemaker carafe into
his stained ceramic cup. She twisted quickly back around and shot a
wide-eyed gaze toward Deputy Carmichael as she mouthed, “I’m
sorry.”
    “KC, Boss,” Skip announced, shaking his head
and grinning. Then he addressed Clovis directly. “Don’t worry, he’s
known ever since I got the call. He was the first one I told. After
all, it was him that got me accepted in the first place.”
    “Bullshit,” the sheriff huffed, ambling over
to the side of the desk. He took a sip of the coffee, screwed up
his face, then swallowed with an even deeper grimace while shaking
his head. “Christ… How old is this sludge?”
    “I’m pretty sure it’s leftover from this
morning,” Clovis replied.
    “No wonder,” he sighed. Without hesitation he
leaned toward the poinsettia on the corner of her desk and dumped
the remaining contents of the cup into it.
    “You know you’ve killed two of those already
this month by doing that,” Clovis announced.
    “Better them than me,” he replied then held
the now empty mug with his middle fingers hooked through the handle
as he nodded toward Skip. “You got your own damn self into the
academy. I just made a couple of calls to warn ‘em that you’d
probably be a pain in the ass to them just like you are to me. But
since you got in anyway, it looks like they didn’t much care what I
thought, now did they?”
    Skip chuckled. “Whatever you say, Boss.”
    The sheriff shot him a quick and wholly
uncharacteristic grin. Since Archie Morton wore an almost perpetual
poker face to go along with his dry wit, any visible show of
emotion in his expression was more than enough to give his staff
pause.
    “Needed doin’. You’re just wastin’ your
talent here, son,” Morton offered. “That much was obvious as soon
as you got your head on straight and started using your powers for
something other than winning bar bets.”
    “Powers,” Skip repeated with an embarrassed
chuckle. “You make it sound like something from a comic book.”
    “Whatever you want to call it,” Morton
continued. “You and that scary accurate instinct of yours would
better serve a police force that has actual crimes to solve, and we
both know this isn’t it. Hulis is where old cops go to relax when
they’re too tired to chase the bad guys anymore. Hell, that’s why I
came back.”
    Skip waited a beat for another dry wisecrack
to be tacked onto the end of the statement. Just as Sheriff
Morton’s expression remained virtually constant, praise was not
something he offered on a regular basis either, especially not
without something diametrically opposed thrown in to temper it.
Given that he’d now given him two compliments in a row, surely
there was a dig coming in their wake.
    However, when several seconds had passed with
no further comment, the deputy raised an eyebrow and said, “Uh…
Thanks, Boss.”
    “Yeah, well don’t let it go to your head. You
might be ‘The Amazing’ Skip here in Hulis, but when you get to KC
there’ll be some sonofabitch who’s even more special than you are,
trust me.”
    The sheriff looked around and then let out a
snort. “Now, shouldn’t you be workin’ or somethin’?” He offered the
words as a statement more than as a question. “You ain’t off to the
big city yet, you