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“Give me your hands.”

With my knee in the small of his back, the struggling man finally concedes.

I’m still gasping for air after chasing the bastard full speed for four blocks down the back alleys along Victoria Street. Serves me right for underestimating the punk. Or maybe I was overestimating myself. Now that I have the guy up close, I can tell I’ve got about twenty years on him.

It’s not like I’ve seen the inside of a gym since I moved here either. All I’ve been doing is sitting on my ass and eating like crap. If I don’t watch it, I’ll end up looking like Randall Donahue, the retired deputy who occasionally volunteers at the office. Clearing three hundred fifty pounds easily, the man is a walking cautionary billboard for a heart attack or stroke.

“It’s too tight,” the punk whines when I slap the cuffs on him.

I test to make sure, sliding a finger between the cuff and his spindly wrist.

“Quit your bellyaching. They’re fine.”

I get to my feet and drag him up with me.

I was just coming out of Strange Brew, the local coffee shop, when I spotted him ducking out of a parked vehicle along Main Street, a briefcase in his hand. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d carry a briefcase, let alone drive the Mercedes he’d pulled it out of. He looked like a bum, dressed in rags, his longish hair and scraggly beard partially concealed by the hood of his dirty sweatshirt. When I called out to him, he startled and immediately started running in the other direction. I took off after him, dropping my highly anticipated coffee, which is probably still somewhere on the sidewalk on Main, along with the briefcase the punk dropped.

“What’s your name?”

His eyes are wild as they dart around, looking for an escape. I’m pretty sure he’s tweaked on something more than the cloud of alcohol fumes wafting off him. Sadly, even a small, relatively peaceful town like Silence isn’t spared from addiction issues. These days drugs and alcohol abuse wreak havoc everywhere, and there are few days we don’t have one or more cases sleeping it off in lockup back at the station.

Of course, this comes with a rise in petty crimes: thefts, break and enters, muggings, loitering, public disturbances. Our sheriff, Savvy Colter, is pushing the department to come down hard on these cases in an attempt to curb the growing problem, but it’s a little like carrying water to the sea. Call it a sign of the times, with people struggling against the ever-growing cost of living. A lot of the time it’s folks who’ve resorted to numbing their problems with one or another substance, ending up further in the hole than they can manage, but in some cases we’re dealing with real hard cases, those who have chosen to live life on the fringe and embracing the criminal aspect.

I suspect my perp is the latter.

“Hey, buddy, what’s your name?” I repeat as I start marching the guy back the four blocks to where I left my cruiser parked in front of the coffee shop.

“Jesse…”

“Jesse what? You got a last name?”

“Ventura,” he says, now a fuck-you glint in his eyes when they slide over me.

Yeah, right.

“Fine, you can come down to the station with me, we’ll get you fingerprinted and find out. Something tells me your prints are going to light up the system.”

He wisely keeps his mouth shut and starts dragging his ass, which means by the time we hit Main Street, I’m virtually hauling him behind me.

Passing The Kerrigan, I glance into the dark establishment. It’s not a surprise it’s closed at this time in the morning, but normally Stella would be in the kitchen, prepping for the day, and she would have the lights on. But she was taken off by ambulance almost a week ago and, from what I’ve heard, is still in the hospital in Spokane where she ultimately ended up.

I caught a glimpse of Jacob on the street outside the pub a couple of days ago, looking pretty haggard, but I haven’t been back since that night, and I haven’t seen Dana around at all. I assume she’s with her mother at the hospital.

Tough break for the family; Jacob may have been the face of The Kerrigan, but Stella is the heart. I sure hope she can come back from whatever is wrong with her. I haven’t been here that long, but even I can tell losing her would be devastating to the family and a major blow to the town in general.

Up ahead I spot the Mercedes, the briefcase perched on the hood, with a man standing beside the vehicle, his arms crossed over his chest. I recognize the pompous figure of the town’s mayor, Don Merrick. A waste of space if ever I saw one.

“This the guy who broke into my car?” he calls out as we approach. “I want you to throw the book at him. Lock him up and throw away the key.”

It doesn’t take much to set off our mayor these days. After an embarrassing and quite public collapse of his marriage last year, when a torrid affair with one of the town’s wealthy socialites exposed him during a criminal investigation. The mayor had no direct involvement in the crime, nor did his mistress, but once the cat was out of the bag, the news torpedoed through our town. If the man was difficult to deal with before, he has since become insufferable.

“I’ve got it under control,” I assure him, but that seems to trigger another level of displeasure.

“Doesn’t seem to me you have, or this lowlife wouldn’t have broken into my car and stolen my briefcase while you lot were sleeping on the job,” he snaps. “Seems to me the sheriff’s department is losing a grip on controlling law and order in this town.”

“It was unlocked,” the idiot in cuffs decides to volunteer.

“What?” Merrick turns to the man, apparently confused by the interruption.