Little White Lies

APRIL 15, 4:59 P.M.

This one’s all you, Rodriguez.”

“No way. I took the drunk tank after the Bison Day parade.”

“Bison Day? Try Oktoberfest at the senior citizen center.”

“And who got stuck with the biter the next day?”

Officer Macalister Dodd—Mackie to his friends—had thegeneral sense that it would not be prudent to interrupt the back-and-forth between the two more senior Magnolia County police officers arguing in the bull pen. Rodriguez and O’Connell had both clocked five years on the force.

This was Mackie’s second week.

“I’ve got three letters and one word for you, Rodriguez: PTA brawl.”

Mackie shifted his weight slightly from his right leg to his left.

Big mistake. In unison, Rodriguez and O’Connell turned to look at him.

“Rookie!”

Never had two police officers been so delighted to see a third.

Mackie set his mouth into a grim line and squared his shoulders.

“What have we got?” he said gruffly. “Drunk and disorderly? Domestic disturbance?”

In answer, O’Connell clapped him on the shoulder and steered him toward the holding cell. “Godspeed, rookie.”

As they rounded the corner, Mackie expected to see a perp: belligerent, possibly on the burly side. Instead, he saw four teenage girls wearing elbow-length gloves and what appeared to be ball gowns.

White ball gowns.

“What the hell is this?” Mackie asked.

Rodriguez lowered his voice. “This is what we call a BYH.”

“BYH?” Mackie glanced back at the girls. One of them was standing primly, her gloved hands folded in front of her body. The girl next to her was crying daintily and wheezing something that sounded suspiciously like the Lord’s Prayer. The third stared straight at Mackie, the edges of her pink-glossed lips quirking slowly upward as she raked her gaze over his body.

And the fourth girl?

She was picking the lock.

The other officers turned to leave.

“Rodriguez?” Mackie called after them. “O’Connell?”

No response.

“What’s a BYH?”

The girl who’d been assessing him took a step forward. She batted her eyelashes at Mackie and offered him a sweet-tea smile.

“Why, Officer,” she said. “Bless your heart.”

NINE MONTHS EARLIER

CHAPTER 1

Catcalling me was a mistake that most of the customers and mechanics at Big Jim’s Garage only made once.

Unfortunately, the owner of this particular Dodge Ram was the type of person who put his paycheck into souping up a Dodge Ram.

That—and the urinating stick figure on his back window—was pretty much the only forewarning I needed about the way this was about to go down.

People were fundamentally predictable. If you stopped expecting them to surprise you, they couldn’t disappoint.

And speaking of disappointment… I turned my attention from the Ram’s engine to the Ram’s owner, who apparently considered whistling at a girl to be a compliment and commenting on the shape of her ass to be the absolute height of courtship.

“It’s times like this,” I told him, “that you have to ask yourself: Is it wise to sexually harass someone who has both wire cutters and access to your brake lines?”