The Devil's Dust by C.B. Forrest Page B

the OPP an hour to make it up here. If we don’t set an example, the drunks and moonshiners will have their way with us. Anyway, I already talked to the new circuit Assistant Crown, Amanda Jason. She’s a real tough cookie.”
    Nolan eases forward, rests an elbow on the desk and his head on his free hand. He says, “This tough on crime line doesn’t have anything to do with running for mayor, does it?”
    Chief Gallagher laughs. It’s a laugh Ed Nolan has come to interpret as Gallagher offering a polite applause or perhaps an easy way out of a bad joke, the politician in him.
    â€œEddie, you need to get some rest. Go lay down, will you? Let Younger hold the fort. You don’t owe this Lacey kid anything. The courts can get him set up with counselling once he’s in the system.”
    They hang up. Nolan sits back in the chair and looks around the small office. Three desks, a coffee pot, a cork board with notices for a potluck at the church and a charity car wash for the high-school hockey team, a few old posters about drunk driving and seatbelt laws. More than big city cops, he and Younger and the Chief are in a position to truly serve and protect this small community. They know the people, they are of the people. He can’t shake the image of Travis Lacey out of his mind, the teen’s eyes wild and zoned, his hands around his mother’s neck. He wishes someone had spent a little more time with him when he himself was a teen, that corrosive adolescent poison coursing through the veins of his brain. He learned a lot of things, or perhaps most things, the hard way.
    Constable Ed Nolan stands and steadies himself. The floor pitches a little as though he is on the deck of a boat. He grabs his jacket from the back of the chair, zips up, and takes the keys to the second cruiser from the lockbox on the wall. He scrawls a note on the chalkboard by the door, a board which they use without any regularity to track their ins and outs.
    Gone to Monteith — Ed, he writes.
Dear Journal,
    Fuck you.
    Cold, tired, sore. Almost out of pills.
    Back home. Strange days. Strange feelings.
    Did I really come from here?
    Where have I been … where am I going?
    Love, Charlie

Eight

    P eggy has begun to put more effort than usual into her appearance. The fact is not lost on McKelvey, who stops by each morning at the same time for a coffee. He makes sure to comment on her hair. She brings a hand to her head and touches the new curls. She smiles. The smile is small but genuine, and McKelvey gets the sense it is a gesture this woman does not offer every customer.
    â€œUsual?” she asks, already pouring coffee into a take-away cup.
    â€œI’ll take one of those cherry sticks I’ve heard so much about.”
    â€œIt’s all hype,” she says as she puts one of the doughnuts in a small brown paper bag.
    â€œYou’re cornering in on my market,” he says. He takes a sip of the coffee and winces from the combination of scalding temperature and bitter taste. He does not come for the coffee, for it does not compare to the high-end and over-priced brew he grew accustomed to in Toronto. A Starbucks on every corner. And if not a Starbucks, then a Second Cup or a Timothy’s. Sometimes it seemed to McKelvey that Toronto was not so much a city as it was a series of restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. Every window you passed belonged either to a cafe or some fake British-style pub with a ridiculous-sounding name like The Syphilitic Toad — as though the corner of Yonge and Eglinton in downtown Toronto was supposed to feel like seventeenth-century London for a few hours after work every Thursday.
    â€œAnd what market is that, Charlie?”
    â€œCynicism,” he says. “You know, courting the general belief that things can and will get worse.”
    â€œOr maybe it’s realism based on experience.”
    â€œYou win,” he says.
    â€œNobody wins.” She