Bullies Spit On A Waitress — Unaware She Was A Commander For 10 Years!
Chapter 15
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
Frank stood up. He was slower than he used to be, and his knee gave him some trouble on cold mornings, but he stood up straight. "I'll be at the diner by 10:00," he said."Thank you," she said.She walked to the door. She stopped. "The program," she said, not looking back. "The one you know about. The integration pilot. How much do you know?"A pause."Enough," Frank said quietly, "to know that if they put you through it and you came out the other end, you didn't come out the same."She nodded once. "Nobody does," she said, and she left.Deputy Lena Marsh drove an unmarked personal car on her days off: a blue Honda, seven years old, with a dent in the rear bumper from a parking lot she'd never gotten fixed because she kept meaning to and kept not finding the time.She pulled up alongside Claire on Hawthorne Street at 11:15 in the morning. She was not in uniform. She leaned across and pushed the passenger door open. Claire got in.They drove for two blocks without either of them speaking. Then Lena turned off Main Street onto a residential road, parked under a bare oak tree, and cut the engine. She looked straight ahead for a moment. Then she said, "I'm sorry about last night.""It wasn't your fault," Claire said."I was there," Lena said. "I executed an order I knew was wrong.""You're working inside a system that will destroy you if you move too fast," Claire said. "I understand that."Lena looked at her. She was thirty-five years old: sharp eyes, dark hair, the face of someone who had been tired for a long time and had learned to function inside the tiredness."How do you know what I'm working inside?" she said."Because you parked two blocks from the diner before coming in last night," Claire said. "You didn't want to be seen arriving. And when you took the statement from Donna, you wrote down every word she said. You didn't paraphrase; you didn't summarize. You created a verbatim record." Lena was quiet. "That's not the behavior of someone following orders," Claire said. "That's the behavior of someone building a record they might need later."Lena turned back to look through the windshield. "Dale Mace has been sheriff for fourteen years," she said. "In that time, he has fired three deputies. All three of them were investigating things he didn't want investigated. Two couldn't find work in law enforcement again; one of them moved out of state.""I know," Claire said."There's a federal hearing tomorrow morning," Lena said."I know that, too.""The investigator in charge called me four months ago," Lena said. "Asked me if I would cooperate. I said yes. I've been feeding information slowly, carefully, making sure nothing I do looks out of place before the hearing." She paused. "There's a problem," she said.