Firebreak (Josie Gray Mysteries #4)(74)
Josie looked at him, surprised that Otto was worn out by the case. “Absolutely. Let’s call it a night.”
“You’ll take off too? Go home and call the negotiator maybe? Have a nice dinner?”
“Are you kidding me?” She laughed in spite of her irritation. “Who told you?”
He ignored her question. “Nick’s a good guy. He’s a hell of a negotiator. But two cops in a relationship together doesn’t make for an easy life.”
“Otto. I’m not marrying him. He stopped by to say hi.”
“He stopped by to check in on you. And, I’m okay with that.”
“Oh, really? Well as long as you’re okay with it, then I feel much better about things now. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
*
After Josie dropped Otto off at the station so he could have a nice meal with Delores, Josie checked around town and discovered that Paula was hanging out at Tiny’s Gun Club, just down the street from the PD.
Tiny was a three-hundred-pound man who wore a feather boa around his massive neck. Aside from the boa, he wore standard gun-salesman garb: jeans, T-shirt, cowboy boots. He claimed the boa was his calling card at gun shows. Everybody knew the guy with the boa. He once told Josie that he used to be the “big gun guy.” It was how people distinguished him from other gun sellers. “Hellfire! Everybody’s big now. Ain’t nothing special about me. I blend in with the next guy. But a boa? Nobody’s got that.”
What Tiny really had going for him was an amazing knowledge of every gun manufactured in the U.S., and many worldwide. It wasn’t the boa that drew people from all over the Southwest to his shop; it was his knowledge of guns that allowed his eccentricities to exist in an environment not always known for tolerance.
Josie entered the shop and found Tiny perched on a stool at the end of a twenty-foot glass counter that ran down one side of the store. Behind him was a display rack that progressed in size from rifles to shotguns. Inside the glass cases was an amazing array of handguns, from miniatures that would fit into a woman’s palm to pistols that would need two hands to aim and fire. And Tiny knew the provenance of every gun he sold. The rest of the shop was filled with neatly stacked shelves of ammo and gun paraphernalia that hunters, gun enthusiasts, and law enforcement used.
Paula Mun?oz stood on the other side of the counter, bent over the glass with her arms perched on top, laughing her way through some story or another. Tiny, being a goodhearted man, sat on his stool patiently listening to the story and nodding at the appropriate moments, laughing when the time came. He seemed to perk up when Josie walked in and she realized he had probably been held hostage for quite some time.
“Josie! What brings you here?” he asked, and slid off his stool. He flung the boa trailing down the front of his body around to the back of his neck and walked toward her, his eyes pointed toward the ceiling. There is a God, he mouthed.
“What can I do for you, dear heart?” he said.
“Actually, I was hoping to have a word with Paula. You think we could have a minute to talk?”
Tiny leaned across the counter and whispered, “Honey, you can have all the minutes you want. That girl never shuts up.”
He headed toward the back of the store and in a voice loud enough for both women to hear, he said, “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I need to check on some inventory.”
Paula smiled, her whole face involved in the act—her eyes wide, her mouth open, her cheeks round and flushed with happiness. Paula was in her midtwenties with a complexion like cream and long blond waves that gave her the look of pure innocence. Paula was also a convicted drug dealer who, to her attorney’s horror, had explained to the sentencing judge, “I provide a service for people. One person with insurance gets a prescription from their doctor. They don’t need it all. I connect that person with someone else who doesn’t have insurance but who still needs the medication. The medicine doesn’t get wasted. Everyone feels better.”
“Ms. Mun?oz, we’re not talking about medicine here,” the judge had explained. “We’re talking about people buying OxyContin who aren’t sick. It’s called prescription drug abuse.”
“No! These are my friends. They are sick. They’re in pain. They just don’t have the money to go see a doctor, and I’m just helping them feel better. What’s so wrong with that?”
The story Josie had heard was that Paula and the judge debated prescription drug abuse until he finally sentenced her to time served and let her off on probation with her promise to let the doctors prescribe the medicine. This had been a year ago, and word on the street was that she hadn’t kept her promise.
Josie stood next to her at the counter. “Hi, Paula. How are you?”
“I’m so good. How are you?” She spoke in a singsong, her voice high and airy.
“I’m okay. I think I saw you the other night at Billy’s memorial service at the Hell-Bent. That was pretty horrible, wasn’t it?”
“It’s sooo horrible. I just feel so bad for Billy. He had sooo much talent and everything. It’s just so bad for everyone in the community.”
“It was nice though, everyone coming together like that to remember Billy.”
“Oh, yes, very nice. Hank did such a wonderful job.”
It crossed Josie’s mind that all Hank had done was sell alcohol to his customers, but she let it go. “What do you think about the rumors about Billy?”