Free Crazy Like a Fox (Lil & Boris #3) (Lil & Boris Mysteries) by Shannon Hill Page B

slurped.
    I reached out and poked a pretzel nugget. It skittered toward Boris, who batted it enthusiastically off the table, and vanished onto the floor to pursue it.
    Punk drank the ginger ale. He looked like a man reconsidering temperance.
    Tom finished his beer. He did not look like a man who’d ever consider temperance.
    I poked at the ice cream some more.
    If there’s anything more glum than unhappy cops trying to drink away their troubles, I don’t want to know what it is.
    I ate some of my ice cream. I’d be running extra miles out of guilt this week, but then, who cared if I got a little soft here and there? Only man in my life had four feet and a tail. And, it so happened, a pretzel nugget in his teeth as he jumped back up beside me. He deposited it on my lap and merowled for praise. I told him he was wonderful, and he settled in to worry at the pretzel nugget like a dog with a bone.
    Tom reached out and grabbed a handful of mixed nuts, and started to sort them out, meticulously, by type. Cashews, peanuts, hazelnuts, macadamia nuts, pecans. Then he lined up some pretzel nuggets, so he had five of each.
    “That’s the most…” Punk started, and stopped. We watched Tom in fascination. This was a guy who, at work, barely remembered to stack papers in To-Do and Done piles. Yet here he sat, all obsessive-compulsively weird on the snacks.
    Tom stopped long enough to drink half his second beer. Then he said, out of nowhere, “Tanya wants to get married.”
    I choked, and came close to having ice cream go up my nose. My mind was definitely no longer on my problems. “Did she go down on one knee and all?”
    Tom shot me a dirty look, and a dirtier one at Punk for laughing. “It ain’t funny! I don’t wanna get married. Not yet. She keeps talking about why waste time.” Tom shuddered. “I know life’s short, that’s why I wanna take my damn time!”
    It wasn’t nice to laugh, but I did. “Sorry,” I said, and Boris’s tail twitched hard, twice. Punk pointed at it, and laughed harder, sputtering something about my cat ratting me out.
    “Look, tell her you can’t think about it while you’re acting sheriff,” I advised, glaring at Boris and his tattle-tail. “Too much stress or something.”
    Tom lit up. Poor sucker. “Will she buy that?”
    I went for honesty. Damn cat didn’t give me much choice. “No. But she’ll back off and play the martyr card. It’ll give you a week or two.”
    “Or,” said Punk, not too helpfully, “she’ll dump you.”
    Tom sulked. “Y’all are supposed to be my best friends, not my big fat pains in the ass. I got enough of them already.”
    That set us off again. I have no idea why. I’d just decided it was time to go home on a happy note when my cell phone rang. It wasn’t even my shift. Then I realized it was Punk’s cell phone. He was on shift. At least, technically.
    Whatever was said took the smile right out of him. He threw a ten onto the table, and nudged Tom to get out of the way. “Gotta go,” he said. “Lil, you’ll want to come, too.”
    Tom failed to look impressive. “Why not me?”
    “You’re drunk,” I said before Punk could try tact. I shrugged on my coat and grabbed Boris. “What’s going on?”
    Punk shook his head, and waited until we were outside to tell me. “You ain’t going to like this,” he said, “but that was my buddy Fowler, with the county. Rucker just arrested Jack Littlepage for kidnapping.”
    ***^***
    I’ve known for years that Vernon Rucker’s mind is small and closed, but somehow simultaneously wide-open to bizarre leaps of illogic. Seeing my cousin Jack Littlepage behind bars in Rucker’s holding cell, however, was enough to make me decide Rucker wasn’t crazy. He was insane. Certifiably in need of round-the-clock care someplace remote and quiet like Sunrise, which is a tiny little facility in the southern part of our county, so exclusive not even most locals know about it.
    I walked into the county police