Free Hot Enough to Kill by Paula Boyd Page B

it off after he blew out the window and said, 'Pardon me, ma'am?'"
    He thought about that for a minute then said, "You sure you didn't see anything at all, or maybe hear something out the window?"
    "Leroy, if I had seen anything or heard anything, I'd tell you! Now why don't you go get busy finding out who tried to kill Jerry. You don't even seem to care about him. And what about some sort of real investigation? This is the second incident in two days. There's a killer out there, Leroy. Do something about it!"
    He looked away for a second and I had the feeling that I'd made a slight point with him, but only a slight one. If I had, he got over his really short guilt trip and looked back at me, shaking his head. "Jerry got nailed with a thirty-eight, Jolene," he said as if talking to a two-year-old. "The mayor was killed with a shotgun. The shootings aren't related."
    "Silly me. I thought 'gunshot through a window' and 'gunshot through a window' sounded sort of alike. What was I thinking?"
    Amazingly my sarcasm did not escape him and he frowned. "I don't have to put up with your smartass remarks anymore. I ask you a question, you answer it right."
    I started to mention that I had just been making a comment, not answering his question, but what was the point. I rubbed my hands across my face, pushed my hair back and sighed heavily. "All right Mister Almighty Powerful Deputy Person, just what is it that I need to say or do to get you to leave me alone?"
    "I'm the acting sheriff, and there's nothing you can do about it. And if you know what's good for you, you'll be watching what you get yourself into. You don't live around here anymore so you don't know how things are now. I do. Don't go stirring up trouble. You've always been too nosy for your own good anyhow. You get in my way and you'll find yourself in a worse place than the superintendent's office."
    Leroy Harper was cleverly referring to my dogged pursuit of a perverted high school principal, or more accurately the removal of said pervert. I took exception to being pounced and kissed in front of the entire student council by a forty-something-year-old fool and promptly told the school superintendent. Since it was the seventies, which in Kickapoo is more relative to the Pleistocene Age, I didn't get any support from the big man, who no doubt believed that I had been "asking for it." The end result was that I had to resign as president of the student council since the pervert was the sponsor. I didn't go quietly, and as I also happened to be the editor of the school newspaper, well, it got a little ugly.
    Since evolution has yet to make any major inroads around here, I knew better than to wage war on the dinosaur standing in front of me. The fact that Leroy has a penis--or at least is suspected of it--pretty much guarantees him support over me.
    "Yeah," he said, hitching up his pants as much as he could around his girth. "After the way you treated me back in school, I'd like nothing better than to throw your ass in jail."
    It goes without saying that Leroy Harper had not been one of my supporters in the old days, not after I'd turned him down for a date about a hundred times. Somehow, while I was saying "Get away from me, you gross pig," he was hearing "Come and get me, baby." Some things never changed. And some things did, like Jerry winding up in ICU with a bullet hole in his chest. I glanced toward the steel doors and shook off a shudder. "Leroy, I'm going to try yet again to phrase this where you can understand. If it were you in that hospital room, what do you think Jerry would be doing right now?"
    Leroy looked down and shuffled his feet, apparently thrown off track by a pertinent issue. "I'm going back out to the crime scene now." He paused for a moment, puffed up his chest and tried again. "I'll do my job, don't you worry yourself. But for all I know, somebody was trying to kill you and got Jerry by mistake."
    "Me?"
    He propped his pudgy hands on his hips. "Well, hell,