The phone rang once. She prayed it wasn’t a call that the remaining family members on both sides were in a brawl. The caller was indeed a Gooding, but she lucked out on the purpose of the call. “I need to know what’s going on,” Mr. Gooding barked. “Do I need to send our lawyer in?”
“I’m trying to talk both of them into not pressing charges so everyone can walk away clean,” Bo said calmly. “Just be patient.”
“Oh.” He sounded surprised by her position. He paused. “Thank you, Chief. If it’ll help, tell Melody I said to go along with your suggestion.”
“I will. Thanks for checking, Mr. Gooding.” If he could be polite, so could she.
Then she waited some more. Finally she got up and went into the interview room where Melody sat, probably bored to death because there was no TV, no magazines, nothing to look at other than her manicure.
The pretty young woman had a sullen expression, but beneath it all she was also beginning to look tired. Burning that much adrenaline took a lot out of a person. Bo pulled out the only other chair in the room and sat down. She waited until Melody looked up at her before saying, “Here’s the deal. Miss Doris won’t press charges if you don’t. You can both act pissy if you think it’ll get you anywhere, but I can tell you up front that all it’ll get you is a rap sheet. Your dad called a while ago and said to tell you to take the deal.”
Melody opened her mouth, likely to say something smart, but then she closed it again and considered her options. “Okay,” she finally said, no arguing, no threats.
Well, hallelujah. Relieved that it was so easy, Bo said, “Where’s your car?”
“At city hall.”
“You want to walk? I can have one of the officers drive you if you don’t.”
“I’ll walk.”
As Bo was showing Melody out, Jesse arrived back at the station from taking Kalie home. He stayed silent until Melody was gone. “Everything work out?”
“Halfway there. I still have Miss Doris in the other room, but Melody’s agreed not to press charges.”
He sat down. “I’ll wait and take Miss Doris home. I know she didn’t drive because Kalie said that Emily picked her up.”
How on earth had Kalie known Emily was picking up her grandmother? Even though Bo had lived here seven years, small-town ways still sometimes baffled her. Everyone knew everyone else’s business. Was the information passed on by some weird osmosis?
“Kalie and Emily are Facebook friends,” Jesse explained with a grin, having noted her expression. “Emily posted about it.”
Social media to the rescue; at least that made sense. She didn’t do Facebook herself, figuring her life was no one else’s business. It wasn’t as if she had a ton of relatives who kept track of her or were interested in what she was doing.
Finally she went in to Miss Doris. She’d chosen Melody first because she’d judged Melody the most likely to press charges, in which case there would be no deal-making with Miss Doris. Again, she pulled up a chair and sat down. Miss Doris looked both guilty and angry, which meant she could tip either way.
Bo said essentially the same thing she’d said to Melody. “Melody has agreed not to press charges if you don’t.”
Miss Doris’s mouth opened in astonishment, closed, then opened again. “She did?” she squeaked.
Bo shrugged. “She’s guilty of the same thing. It makes sense for both of you to drop it and walk away.”
“Well, my goodness.” Miss Doris paused for maybe half a second. “All right. If she’s dropping it, so will I.”
“Good deal. Jesse said he’ll take you home.”
“That’s sweet of him. I imagine it’s dark by now.”
“Yes, it is, but we wouldn’t let you walk home anyway.”
And that was that. Jesse and Miss Doris went out the back door to his cruiser just as Morgan and Tricks came in, meeting them on the way. They stood in the door for a minute or so, saying hello and exchanging small talk, then the first two were gone and the second two came on into the station. Tricks went immediately to Bo, smiling her doggy smile and putting her paw on Bo’s knee.
“I missed you too,” Bo crooned, doing some two-handed ear-rubbing as she bent down and rested her forehead on top of Tricks’s head. She looked up at Morgan. “Why are you two here?”
“I figured you’d had time to get everything sorted out, short of there being actual blood involved, and thought you might be hungry. We can get a hamburger at the drive-through if you want.”
A nice hot hamburger that she hadn’t cooked herself sounded great. “Let’s go,” she said, getting to her feet. She locked the station doors and they all got into the big Tahoe. The hamburger joint was just a couple of blocks away, so there wasn’t much time for her to tell him anything other than her food order, which was a small hamburger, small fries, and a bottle of water. Morgan’s choice was the deluxe cheeseburger, which was twice the size of her hamburger, large fries, and also a bottle of water. They took their food booty back to the station and arranged it on her desk, then Morgan dragged the chair over to their makeshift table and sat down across from her.
“Your truck driver friend called,” he said as he salted his fries and opened packets of ketchup to squeeze over them. “He went through Alabama and stopped to pick you up some Naked Pig; he figured you wanted some, so he didn’t bother checking. He brought it over, and I paid him.”