Free Nick of Time by John Gilstrap Page A

she’d be able to go anywhere in the country and get a job on a department where her skills would be appreciated. The good news was, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, Darla knew without doubt that no matter what lay ahead, she would be able to say that she’d already had the worst job in law enforcement.
    Relief was on the horizon, though. In two weeks it would be Memorial Day and after that, Sheriff Hines would be free to hire in the supplemental force of summer deputies to help with the influx of tourists. For at least a few months, then, Darla would no longer be the only outsider to be shunned by the inner circle.
    But two weeks was two weeks, and for the time being, it was Darla versus the department, with no reinforcements. Actually, she’d reached a certain peace with it. Let George Sugrue get his jollies calling her names, and let the rest of the department think that he was getting the best of her. Fact was, ten years from now, Darla Sweet would be a detective in a major police force somewhere, on her way to a command position, while those goobers were still yukking it up in Essex. Success was always the best revenge.
    Darla piloted her cruiser through the parking lot, looking for trouble. Not to cause it, but to break it up when she saw it brewing. She learned last year that these middle two weeks in May were the toughest time for law enforcement here. The spring break hellions were gone, and the real-money tourists wouldn’t start arriving till June, leaving great beachfront rental bargains to be scarfed up by college kids who then jammed thirty people into houses built to sleep ten, drinking themselves into oblivion. They’d get into fights and hurt themselves, or merely fall off the dune decks and hurt themselves, and every father in town would complain that their darling daughters had been asked by these pigs to do something unspeakable.
    Not that far removed from the end-of-the-school-year party crowd herself, Darla understood how it all worked, and the partying, per se, wasn’t what bugged her. What knotted her panties was the blatant way in which they flaunted their disobedience of the law, and Sheriff Hines’s ready willingness to let them get away with it.
    Right now, for example, in front of the Food Lion, three-quarters of the parking spaces were taken, and it was a pretty safe bet that the kiddies weren’t shopping for vegetables. In fact, at this very moment, three boys who couldn’t be older than sixteen hadn’t even bothered to wrap their twelve-pack of Coors in a bag as they carried it to their car. They knew—as every tourist figured out after a season or two of visiting their fair town—that down here in Vacationland, you didn’t need IDs or permission slips. Sheriff Hines knew as well as they did that the fastest way to get yourself unelected was to do anything to inhibit the flow of money into the pockets of the citizen-merchants. Essex businessmen tolerated five tons of bullshit from tourists every single day, thank you very much, and their only satisfaction was the cash left behind in their wake. So long as it didn’t involve illegal drugs or violence against fellow tourists, Essex was an anything-goes oasis in the summertime. Kids could drink themselves into a stupor and fornicate themselves raw on the beaches. There was even an early-morning beach patrol to clean up the rubbers and other trash before the sun worshipers could hit the sand.
    It was the job of the Essex County Sheriff’s Department to walk a legal and political tightrope, making sure that the permanent residents of the community—the voters—remained unharrassed by the visitors, while at the same time making sure that the visitors enjoyed the sense of freedom that kept them coming back for more.
    Darla had drawn duty on the north end of the county tonight—the sector with the most year-round residents. As she pulled into traffic, she checked her watch and