booth, his real booth, the booth he moved to the moment he came back to the diner.
“I have no idea. The girl doesn’t say a peep. Polite as pie, easily pleased, but she is closed up tight as a clam. I haven’t pried much, but you know how most people love to come in here and gush about themselves? Well she sits, reads, writes, and watches.” Betty’s hands were moving frantically, as they usually did when she gossiped. Bobby often wondered if she would know what to say if she couldn’t flail her hands around when she spoke.
“Watches what?” Bobby asked, losing more interest in the story by the minute. After Betty’s animated response he was more convinced than ever that the girl was probably only taking in the sights of a lackluster town and dreaming up some soap opera to write an English paper about. That was the problem with living so close to a college. You often found yourself dealing with entitled students.
“Everything. The girl seems like a private eye. She watches everything, and everybody. To tell you the truth, she’s got my antennas up. You know how I have that sixth sense about people? Well my radar is going off like crazy with her. She’s got something going on. I just haven’t asked the right questions.” Betty’s excitement over the whole thing had sealed the deal for Bobby. A nosy waitress hoping a boring customer will turn out to be something more than she is.
“I’ve got to get to work.” Bobby laid his money on the table for Betty and kissed her lightly on the cheek. The woman was a bit cracked but she’d been better to him than his own family at times, and something about her always made him feel good.
God knows he needed a reason to feel better. There were moments in everyone’s life that could be considered tipping points—events that became large black lines forever separating the before from the after. Bobby’s came two weeks ago, and it certainly changed his life, career, and plans.
Sam Manton. Just thinking his name put a brick in Bobby’s stomach. He’d spent four months of this year, his rookie year, building a case against this creep. Manton was pretty widely known for importing dope of all kinds into Edenville and the surrounding areas. No one in the department showed much interest, which still puzzled him.
Taking Manton down seemed like a no-brainer. Sure, maybe it was only water cooler chatter but the rumors of Manton’s deals had become enough to convince Bobby it was worth the department’s effort. It was at least worth investing some time into checking him out a little more.
Bobby remembered thinking that he signed on to this job to make a difference. He wasn’t interested in sitting around the donut shop on lazy afternoons with the rest of the beat cops comparing stories about the couple of times in their years of service they actually saw some action. He had heard the story of Donny Lee foiling a bank robbery so many times that he felt like he’d been there making a deposit himself that day. In reality, it was a transient guy passing through town who handed a note to the teller. She pressed the silent alarm, and Donny peeled himself off his diner stool, crossed the street, and strolled down to the bank when he heard it go over the radio. The guy was walking out with the money when Donny was walking in. He drew his gun, said, “Freeze,” and that was that. But now whenever the opportunity arose he told the story like a scene out of Point Break.
So one day Bobby decided he would spend his free time watching Sam Manton. He would do a little freelance P.I. work and see if the story would start to come together. The problem was it didn’t take much work on his end to see what was happening. Manton had been running guns into town and then selling them to drug dealers in nearby cities. His drug trades were fairly easy to spot as well but didn’t seem to be his main focus. The guns must have been where the money was because that’s what he was moving and moving them fast. It took some snooping, some eavesdropping, and some patience, but nailing him was not quite the insurmountable task Bobby feared it would be. There were moments Manton seemed to parade his deals down Main Street.
Bobby considered himself lucky. He would