Pray for Silence

Pray For Silence



Officer Chuck “Skid” Skidmore wished he hadn’t indulged in that last cup of coffee. If it wasn’t for the new waitress at the diner, he would have stopped at just one. But damn she was cute. So he’d sat at the counter the entirety of

his dinner break and sucked down caffeine like a ten- year- old gorging on Kool-Aid. Brandy obliged by keeping his mug full, and entertaining him with her twenty-something chitchat and a full two inches of jiggling cleavage. He’d been eating at LaDonna’s Diner every night for two months now, since the chief assigned him the graveyard shift. He hated working nights.

He respected the chief, but he was going to have to have a talk with her about getting back on days.

Skid turned his cruiser onto Hogpath Road, a desolate stretch of asphalt bounded by Miller’s Woods to the north and a cornfield on the south side.

The cruiser’s tires crunched over gravel as he pulled onto the shoulder. He was reaching for the pack of Marlboro Lights in the glove box when his radio

crackled.

“Three-two-four. Are you 10-8?”

Mona was the third-shift dispatcher and his sole source of entertainment--after the diner closed, anyway. She’d kept him from dying of boredom many a night. “Roger that, Dispatch.”

“So did you talk to her?”

“That’s affirm.”

“You ask her out?”

Throwing open his door to keep the smell of smoke out of the cruiser, Skid lit the Marlboro. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

“You’re the one who’s been talking about her for the last two months.”

“She’s too young for me.”

“Since when does that make a difference?”

“You’re tying up the radio.”

Mona laughed. “You’re chicken.”

Wishing he’d never told her about his crush on Brandy, he drew on the cigarette. “Whatever.”

“Are you smoking?”

He mouthed the word shit.

“You said you were going to quit.”

“I said I was going to either quit drinking or smoking. I sure as hell ain’t going to do both in the same week.” He sucked in a mouthful of smoke. “Especially

when I’m stuck working nights.”

“Maybe the chief’s still pissed about that old lady you roughed up.”

“I didn’t rough her up. That old goat was drunk out of her mind.”

“She was sixty-two years old--”

“And naked as a jaybird.”

Mona giggled. “You get all the good calls.”

“Don’t remind me. The sight of her wrinkled ass has damaged me for life.”

He sighed, his bladder reminding him why he’d stopped in the first place. “I gotta take a piss.”

From PRAY FOR SILENCE by Linda Castillo, copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC