The Witch's Want Ch. 02

He finished his cigarette and the coffee and drove back into town.

Pulling up across the street from the shop again, he got out and walked to the opposite end of the block and began to do the old cop-on-the-beat thing, peering into store windows and checking the doors to make sure they were locked. A good thing, too, he found one door unlocked and checked hard for signs of tampering or a break-in. He called it in to his dispatch and stood for a moment to look around. Back on the sidewalk, dispatch came back and told him that the store owner had been contacted and would be on the scene in about ten minutes.

Bart used the time to stroll down a few more stores and looked at the bookstore. The hours were posted there, but said nothing about being open until one in the morning. He saw what he would expect to see in the window. Books. Well, books and little statuettes of a fantastic nature, such as old wizards and dragons.

It made him smile to look at them and that caused him to wonder about the exact second when he had grown too old to like things of this nature. In spite of the places that he'd been and some of the horrific scenes that he'd witnessed in both lives, he decided that it hadn't happened yet and was thankful.

A car came around the corner and pulled up at the curb. A man stepped out and Bart turned to walk to him. But there was one detail that he picked up on in that bookstore window. He filed it away for the moment and doubted that it would interest him, but one ever knew.

Back at the unlocked door, he spoke to the storeowner and after finding that there was no alarm system, he told the man that it would be wise to invest in one. He watched as the owner checked for anything missing or broken and then accepted the man's thanks as he got into his car to drive back to his bed.

Bart knew that he could have likely scored a 'warning' on the breathalyzer in his cruiser if he'd asked the man to provide a breath sample, but that wouldn't have accomplished anything positive. The man appeared to be in command of his faculties and showed no signs of inebriation other than what Bart got from the hint of wine on his breath. He watched the man drive off and then walked back to the cruiser, smiling to himself over the detail in the window of the bookstore.

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It was getting near nine as she drove in to her shop. She noticed the speedtrap close to the entrance of the town and her eyes flicked down to the speedometer just to make sure. Then she studiously looked away, pretending to check her rear-view mirror and the fields off to her left as she drove past, hoping that her old car wouldn't choose this moment to fart too heavily as she went past.

Bart was just walking back to his cruiser after handing the driver of another car his citation for speeding. He was tired now, but had taken the two hours of overtime to stand the radar picket into town. Every time that he blinked now, he could see the bed in his motel room and thought that it had gotten pretty bad if he was thinking of that as a restful place.

He saw her coming, of course. He just didn't really look up, and purposely turned to look back over his shoulder at the car leaving to make sure that he signaled and drove off safely. If the disgusted old man threw the ticket out of the window now, he'd really enjoy writing him another one for littering.

Bart also wanted to be looking anywhere other than at the smoking old wreck as it went by. He'd have to do something about it then. He was sure that within about fifteen seconds, he'd find enough wrong to pull the plates off it for being unroadworthy. There are enough cops in the world who do their best to maintain a stupid "us and them" mentality. Bart wasn't like that. The man he'd once been had owned a car like that on more than one occasion himself and while he knew that there were drivers who didn't give a damn about the state of their vehicles, most wouldn't be driving them like that if they could afford not to be.

Besides, he thought, it was a small enough place that he was pretty well guaranteed to see the clunker again. He just didn't want to see it while he was in uniform right now, and especially not while he had those three words in his heart from the little sign in the bookstore window. He'd felt at least a little bit hopeful ever since he'd seen them. They made a lovely little sentence which he now repeated as his mantra of the morning.

Room for Rent.