Revelations by Laurel Dewey Read Free Book Online Page B

Beanie? “Well, fuck me!” Jane said under her breath, with indignation. “I don’t need this shit.” She turned toward the door.
    “Jane!” Weyler snapped. “Close the door and sit down.” He turned to Bo. “She’s staying. I’m staying. And we’re going to figure out this damn case. So, let’s all take a deep breath and try to work together.”
    Jane closed the door and meandered to an empty chair in front of Bo’s desk. Weyler slid into the seat next to her as Bo readjusted the sinking waist on his trousers, zipped up his standard issue police chief’s jacket and walked with an unsteady gait
to his beaten-down office chair. He plopped down hard into the seat, wincing almost imperceptibly. The cluttered room was hot and stuffy. Jane removed her jacket and scanned the disorganized office. Sure, there was the building remodel but she figured that Bo’s office space had probably always looked like the aftereffects of a tornado. His desk was littered with paperwork, a cluster of old coffee cups, opened and unopened files, pens, and dried rinds of oranges that were beginning to petrify. There were also three mismatched lamps, all with a thick coat of dust on their shades, and a myriad of sandwich wrappers and Styrofoam containers that held some kind of food that was eaten during the Clinton administration. A wooden sign—at one time displayed on the wall—now lay across a stack of papers. It read: IT IS WHAT IT IS.
    Two file cabinets stood to Jane’s left, both topped with another pile of papers and files bursting with even more documents. A calendar was taped to one of the file cabinets. Large black Xs filled the dates that had already passed. The square eleven days from that date was circled in a thick red pen. Behind Bo’s desk was a large window that overlooked Main Street. In front of the window stood a strange assortment of file boxes, each a different color and each marked with either a !, ?, a thumbs up and a thumbs down drawing. The patchwork chaos made no sense to Jane. For her, sitting in this office was like inhabiting the center of Bo Lowry’s brain—an unbalanced place, indeed.
    “Looks like you have your hands full with the remodel,” Weyler offered in an attempt to inject a neutral statement.
    “Yeah, we’re charging feet first into the Twentieth Century,” Bo snorted, obviously not happy with the whole upheaval.
    “Don’t you mean Twenty-first?” Jane asked.
    “I got bad knees. I can only handle one jump of a century at a time,” he snarled, his liver still spitting bile knowing that he had to deal with Sergeant Detective Jane Perry. He took a puff of his cigar. “It’s what the new police chief asked for. He’s one of
them young, techno boys. It’s costing the town a bundle but they don’t care. Throw enough money around and you know what it buys.”
    Jane wanted to say, “Whores, silence and beauracracy” but decided against it.
    “Too much goddamn technology for my blood! They try to tell me it’s all 10-8,” Bo grumbled, using old cop talk for a good piece of equipment , “But it’s all over my bald head.” He tapped his pudgy fingers nervously on his cluttered desk. “Everybody texts and emails these days! Whatever happened to callin’ somebody up and actually talkin’ to them?” Quickly, he sat up in his swivel chair, waving his hand toward the activity on the other side of his half-opened Venetian blinds. “That’s not my style, Morgan. See what I’m sayin’? They start usin’ all these fancy techno words and I can’t figure heads or tails what they’re talkin’ about. Makes what’s left of my hair hurt.” Jane sensed an uneasy edge to Bo’s voice. Fear crept in at the corners of his tenor.
    “You still have seven or eight good years in you, Bo,” Weyler offered. “You’re not that close to Social Security.”
    “Hell, Beanie, I could have a massive stroke, completely paralyzed, livin’ in a wheelchair, drool drip pin’ down my chin and