Jumping In by Cardeno C.

Chapter One
    “Hey, handsome. You’re back a day early, ain’t ya?” Sally Bouvier said. She smacked her gum and twirled a strand of her blue hair around her matching blue manicured finger. “I wasn’t expecting ya till tomorrow.”
    “Tomorrow’s Saturday and I have the weekday shift.”
    “Like ya’d be gone for two weeks and not come see me the second ya got back.” She rolled her eyes at the ridiculousness of that possibility. “Clint Rivera, what kind of fool do ya take me for?”
    Technically, he was coming in to check if any of his cases needed his immediate attention or if the sheriff was short-staffed and wanted him to work that weekend. Both possibilities were unlikely in sleepy Hawthorne, New Mexico, but it wasn’t as if anybody was waiting for him at home, which was the very reason he’d packed his two dogs, thrown his camping gear in the back of his truck, and driven out of town two weeks earlier. Clint wasn’t normally one to take a vacation, but he’d had hours accrued and it was use it or lose it. His temper, not the time. And the last thing he needed was another round of anger management classes. Besides, Sally wasn’t all wrong about his reason for coming to the station.
    “I picked you up a couple of those date shakes you like on my way into town.” He set a plastic bag filled with ice and two Styrofoam cups on Sally’s desk. “I didn’t want them to melt.”
    “Aww, honey, ain’t ya sweet.” Sally jumped up from her chair, hurried around her desk, and threw her arms around him. Well, she tried, anyway. Between the size of her breasts and the width of his chest, it was more like a half-hug. “Did ya get one for yourself, sugar? Ain’t they just the cat’s meow?”
    “Uh…” He had in fact gotten one of the infamous date shakes at the truck stop off the interstate, but he didn’t like the sickly sweet flavor and after he’d encountered chunks of what he could only hope were dates, he’d tossed the whole thing. Not that he wanted to admit such sacrilege to Sally. The woman might be half his size, but she ran the sheriff’s office and she’d become an adopted mother of sorts to him since he’d arrived in Hawthorne.
    Thankfully, she saved him from answering her question when she leaned back, looked him up and down and then crinkled her nose and said, “Although I do declare, honey, ya surely could have gotten washed off first instead of bringing the campground in here with ya.”
    After two years working with Sally, Clint still had no idea what kind of dialect she had or where she’d picked it up. Nobody else in the town, or for that matter, in the state, spoke with her particular twang and as far as he knew, Sally was a Hawthorne native.
    “I stopped at home and took a shower.” Rubbing his hand over his smooth cheeks, he said, “I even shaved.”
    “Humph.” She walked back to her chair, brushing off her dress as she went. “Darlin’, I got more dirt on me from huggin’ ya just now than I did when Tommy Elders and I necked out by Eagle Nest Lake.”
    “Who’s Tommy Elders?” Clint asked as he pounded his hands on his flannel shirt, denim jacket, and jeans. Based on the poofs of dust, he could see Sally’s point. Washing his truck was next on his agenda, otherwise any shower followed by a drive would be pointless.
    “He was my high school beau.” Sally sighed happily and smiled at the memory. “Tommy was a real looker.” She appraised Clint. “He had black hair and brown eyes like ya, same with that constant tan, but he was more delicate, like them runway models.”
    At six feet two inches tall and one hundred and eighty pounds, nobody ever called Clint delicate.
    “You went to school with a model?” he said, surprised that someone from Hawthorne was anywhere near famous and he’d never heard about it. Of the thirty thousand residents in town, twenty-nine thousand were active participants in the rumor mill and the other thousand were too young to talk.