Bo hesitated. “Let me think about it.” She really didn’t want to spend an hour or so crouched on a slow-moving float, especially when there wasn’t any guarantee Tricks would sit prettily even with Bo nearby. She sighed. Oh hell, of course she’d do it, if Tricks would cooperate. “We’d need to do a practice run or two, to see if she’d do it. She might hate the commotion.”
Then again, when had Tricks ever hated being the center of attention? Nevertheless, Bo wasn’t going to spring anything on her that was that far outside her experience.
“I’ll get something set up,” he promised and lightly slapped the door frame as he straightened. “Thanks, Chief. I’ll tell the kids it’s a maybe, and it depends on Tricks.”
She rolled up the window and continued down the street toward the police station, but before she reached there she saw Jesse’s patrol car come racing up the street and slide to a stop in front of Doris Brown’s bakery. He leaped out of the car and ran inside.
Unless he had a cake emergency, Bo thought, something was wrong. She pulled to the curb on the opposite side of the street, let the window down a couple of inches so Tricks would have fresh air, and dashed across the street to join him. Had someone had a heart attack? Just as she reached the sidewalk, she heard a scream and a loud crash and her heart jumped; she jerked the door open and rushed inside.
At first the scene was too chaotic to make sense. Jesse and a man were rolling on the floor, throwing punches. Miss Doris stood behind the counter, her hands clapped to her cheeks with her eyes wide and panicky while she emitted a series of little cries like a squeaky car alarm going off. Her granddaughter, Emily, sat crying on the floor with a hand held over her left eye. The glass in one of the counters was broken, as was a table. A customer, Brandwyn Wyman, had grabbed up one of the chairs and was circling the two men fighting, ready to clobber one of them in the head if she got an open shot.
All Bo knew was that if a fight was going on, she was on Jesse’s side. Without giving herself time to think and chicken out, she gulped once and threw herself into the fray and locked her arm under the other guy’s chin, pulling back as hard as she could. If nothing else, at least she could distract him and give Jesse a chance to get him handcuffed.
The man bucked and threw himself sideways, trying to dislodge her. The impact with the floor jarred her, hard, made her vision blur and sound fade. She’d never been in a physical fight before and wasn’t prepared for the shock of impact—it was, well, shocking—but she tightened her arm and held on, reaching over his shoulder to clamp her free hand around her other wrist to keep him from breaking her grip. Another scream split the air, Jesse was swearing like a sailor, and then she felt the guy’s muscles tightening as he gathered himself and lurched to his feet with her clinging to his back for all she was worth. He punched blindly over his shoulder, catching her on the right cheekbone. A series of things happened almost simultaneously:
She saw stars. Literally.
Fury swamped her, a red, all-encompassing fury that blotted out reason and felt as if her entire body had expanded from the force of it. She heard someone roaring, “I’ll tear your fucking head off!” and to her horror realized it was her because she was suiting action to words and had her knees braced against his back while she hauled back with all her body weight behind it.
Jesse came off the floor like a tiger, reaching for them.
And Brandwyn stepped in, a five-foot-two, red-haired avenging angel with purpose in her eyes as she swung the chair with the precision of a professional baseball player, missing Bo’s head by inches but clobbering the hell out of her target.
The guy went down like a fallen tree. Not being an experienced rider of either horses or humans, Bo couldn’t launch herself free fast enough to evade yet another impact with the floor. The back of her head slammed against wood, her right shoulder slammed against something else, and there was a brief moment of silence.
“Holy shit.”
Again, the voice was hers, faint and astonished now. She blinked up at the ceiling and tried to make her surroundings snap into place because they seemed to be doing crazy stuff such as whirling and dancing. She heard Jesse on the radio, his tone sharp and urgent, then Miss Doris’s round face swam into view as she knelt beside Bo. She was saying, “Oh lordy, oh lordy,” over and over.
Bo took a deep breath, and her surroundings did indeed snap back into place, with an audible pop! She turned her head and saw Jesse efficiently handcuffing the guy and rolling him over as he cast a swiftly assessing look at her.
“Get some ice, Miss Doris. For both Emily and the chief.”
Miss Doris scrambled to her feet and hurried away, and her place was taken by both Emily and Brandwyn. Emily’s left eye was swollen and rapidly bruising, but she seemed otherwise unhurt. She grabbed some napkins from the holder on one of the tables and gently pressed it to Bo’s cheekbone. Brandwyn squatted beside her, her attention darting from Bo to the unconscious man as if prepared for him to recover and cause more trouble. If so, from the fierce expression on her face, she intended to be prepared.
“What the hell?”
Bo wondered who was controlling her tongue, because the last three sentences out of her own mouth had been swear words. Not that she didn’t cuss a bit now and then, but she’d always been careful not to say the F word now that she was chief. That ban had now been broken, and she had no doubt the entire town would know her utterances, verbatim, before the day was over. Mayor Buddy might feel he needed to have a word with her over her public use of foul language.