Living in Sin
Copyright© 2025 by Al Steiner
Chapter 15: What’s Your Name?
Fiction Sex Story: Chapter 15: What’s Your Name? - Two single-parent sheriff’s deputies move into a wealthy, uptight neighborhood and accidentally set off a storm of paranoia, lust, and suburban meltdown. As judgmental neighbors spiral, sexually frustrated housewives come calling. Amid threesomes, gossip, and chaos, Scott and Maggie discover their friendship hides something deeper. Darkly funny, raw, and fearless, Living in Sin is a satire of morality, desire, and the lies we live behind picket fences.
Caution: This Fiction Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Fa/Fa
Scott reeked of sex.
He smelled like sweat and shampoo, vanilla body lotion and Lena. His thighs were sore, his back ached like he’d been thrown against a wall twice, and there was a faint, tacky smear on the inside of his left knee he was choosing not to investigate. The Reverse Cypress Starbucks Maneuver had gone off exactly as planned—silent pickup, low-profile drop-off, not a single HOA busybody spotted him climbing out of Lena’s back seat like a well-used secret.
He came in through the garage just before 11:30, locked the door behind him, and sighed into the stillness of the house. Maggie was asleep—dead to the world after finishing her last shift of the week and meeting Stacy, her enthusiastic newly discovered that she is a lesbian lover, at the gym after work for a little parking lot tuna casserole. The kids were at school until 2:35. He had the house to himself and no obligations until it was time to go pick them up while pretending he hadn’t spent the morning getting railed into a puddle.
He opened the fridge and grabbed one of the bottles of Gatorade Maggie kept stocked for general hydration. It was the green kind, which was his favorite. He drank half the bottle in one go, standing in front of the open fridge like a man trying to cool off from the inside out. Then, with a satisfied grunt, he shut the door and headed to his bedroom.
He stripped down to his boxers, dropped onto the bed, and grabbed his phone from the nightstand. He opened the alarm app and toggled on the preset labeled 2:15 PM – KID RUN—his go-to for nap days, post-shift days, or mornings like this one, where a few hours of unconsciousness might be the only thing standing between him and a catastrophic mood crash. He did need to get some sleep before returning to work tonight after his RDOs.
He set the phone down.
And then he remembered.
The gummy.
Lena had brought it up about an hour earlier, sometime between round two and the brief but spirited attempt at round three.
“That gummy your mom gave me last week?” she’d said, brushing her fingers along his stomach. “Do you think she’d let me have another one?”
“You liked it that much?” he’d asked, already knowing the answer.
“I took it after dinner and spent two hours floating around the kitchen listening to a lo-fi playlist and reorganizing my spice rack.”
“That’s the mango-lime for you,” he said. “It’s for vibes and focused domestic energy. Mom swears by it for full moon cleaning days.”
“You’re familiar with it?” she asked, surprised.
“Not from personal experience,” he said. “I haven’t had any THC in my system since college. The department rather frowns upon us imbibing even if it is state legal in California. It’s still federal illegal and that makes it a no-no for duly sworn peace officers.”
“That’s a bummer,” she said.
“Kind of,” he agreed. “Mom tells me about the stuff all the time though. She wants me to run for head of the deputy sheriff’s union and make allowing recreational ganja use for cops my platform. Says it’ll make a more efficient and less violent law enforcement presence in Heritage County.”
“That’s wild,” Lena said. “Anyway, whatever it was, it was heaven. Tell her I’ll pay for it.”
“She won’t take your money.”
“What if I made her a batch of sholeh zard?”
“What’s that?” Scott asked.
Lena smiled, still tracing slow circles on his stomach with her fingers. “It’s a saffron rice pudding—Persian-style. We make it with rosewater, cardamom, slivered almonds, sometimes pistachio if it’s a fancy batch. Sweet, silky, yellow as hell. My mom used to say it could heal a broken heart if you stirred it slow enough.” She shrugged. “It’s basically comfort in a bowl.”
“Would it taste good if she had the munchies after a double dose of Tequila Sunset Nightberry gummies?” he asked.
“It would be the ultimate in stoner food,” she said. “I’m pretty sure my ancestors came up with it after smoking some Tehranian Terror hashish back in the glory days of the empire.”
“She would consider that a fair and equitable trade,” Scott said. “Especially if you tell her that ancient Persian stoners have been ritualizing it since the days of the Muslim Conquest.”
Now, Scott smirked faintly and reached for his phone again.
He flipped to his starred contacts.
Mom.
He tapped the number and waited.
It rang once.
Then—
“Hi, my beautiful boy,” Mom answered, her voice full of sunshine and sandalwood. “I was just thinking about you...”
“Hey, Mom,” Scott said, settling back on the bed. “Just wanted to check in. You’re still good for tonight?”
“Of course,” she said. “Already set the alarm on my phone. No repeat of the Great Thursday Night Forgetting of last month.”
“You weren’t that late,” he said diplomatically, though he had been forced to call the watch commander to let him know he would not be able to attend briefing that night but would be able to hit the streets more or less on time. Awkward. Not the sort of thing that built favor with the bosses.
“Well, I still felt awful about it. Memory slips are just part of getting older, honey.”
Especially when you’ve been marinating your brain in THC daily since the original Thursday night lineup of Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, he thought but did not say.
“Shit happens, Mom,” he did say, using one of her favorite expressions in life. Sometimes he thought that she was the one who actually came up with that phrase in the first place.
“I’ll be there at 7:00 PM sharp,” she said. “I picked up a new blend of lemon balm tea and some freeze-dried mangoes I want to try out on the kids.”
“They’ll love that,” Scott said dryly, knowing they probably wouldn’t, but they’d eat it to make her happy. They were good kids and they both loved ‘Nana’, as they called the only grandparental figure they had in their lives.
“Oh, and I found that lavender lotion Katie likes—the one that smells like sleepy clouds. I swear it makes her dreams more peaceful. You should try some on your temples.”
“I’ll add it to the list,” he said. “But actually ... I have a gummy request.”
“Oooh,” she said. “For who?”
“Maggie’s friend Lena. The one she asked for last week. Apparently she really liked the mango-lime. She was wondering if you might have another.”
There was a delighted pause.
“She wants another one? That makes me so happy,” Mom said. “And tell Maggie she has such progressive and honest friends. I never even met the girl but I can feel her energy’s in the right place.”
“She also offered to make you some kind of Persian rice pudding in return,” Scott said. “I already forgot the name.”
“Sholeh zard, ” Mom said immediately. “Oh my God. I haven’t had that since my pilgrimage to Haight-Ashbury during the Occupy Wall Street Movement. There was this Iranian anarchist named Pejman who lived in a painted school bus and made the most amazing sholeh zard in a solar-powered crockpot. His chakras were all misaligned, but the man could infuse saffron like a sage.”
Scott closed his eyes and breathed through it. Of course there was an anarchist named Pejman. Of course there was solar pudding.
“She doesn’t have to trade for it,” Mom continued, “but I’ll accept the gift with love and intention if it’s made from the heart.”
“It’s definitely made from the heart.”
“Oh! Speaking of THC and all of its beneficial aesthetics, have you given any more thought to my idea?”
Scott rubbed his eyes. “Which idea?”
“Running for union president on a platform of letting deputies bong out after hours if they want to. I honestly believe we’d have a more peaceful and emotionally available police culture.”
Scott sighed. “I’m still too new for union leadership, Mom. I’ve only been on patrol for a year. I don’t even get to sit at the cool table at in-service training yet.”
“Well,” she said, undeterred, “just keep it in mind. Law enforcement officers with access to the soothing and introspective qualities of good ganja are cops who will break down the so-called ‘pig culture’ and bring about true reform to the institution. It could change the world.”
“I’ll start gradually introducing the concept,” he promised.
“You will be such a wonderful reformist leader,” she said, fully sincere. “You’re grounded. You’ve got vision. You don’t overreact. And you’ve been watching authority systems crumble since the Clinton administration. You’ve got the context.”
Scott let her talk, smiling faintly.
“I’ll bring an extra gummy,” she said. “Tell Maggie’s friend she’s got cosmic clearance from me.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“You’re welcome, sweetheart. I’ll see you tonight. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
She hung up. He set the phone down and exhaled slowly, still half-smiling, half-bracing for the energy storm she’d bring with her.
Lena’s gummy was secured. She would stroll by with Ranger at 8:30 AM the next morning and he would hand it off to her like a prisoner passing a kite on the fifth floor of the main jail.
Now it was time to catch a little shut-eye before his shift tonight. Dinner would be Doordash pizza. And they would have dried mangoes for dessert. What could be better than that?
At exactly 6:46 PM, the sound of a struggling air-cooled engine rumbled up the street and into the driveway.
Scott didn’t have to look.
It was the unmistakable chug and cough of the 1967 VW Microbus—cream over rust with a peace-sign bumper sticker and one mismatched rear window that had been plexiglass since the early ‘90s. His mother’s pride and joy. His father’s ongoing mechanical nightmare.
It was the very same bus that his grandparents—OG hippies in the most committed sense of the term—had driven to Woodstock in back in 1969. They swore they’d made the cross-country journey with Tom and Mary Kingsley, the parents of Jake Kingsley from Intemperance, the infamous local boy turned rock god whose reputation could still make a dive bar bartender roll their eyes. They even had a pair of blurry Polaroids showing a man and a woman—both long-haired and barefoot—playing guitar and fiddle on a dirt hillside. His grandparents insisted the one with the guitar was Tom Kingsley, and the woman with the fiddle was Mary.
Scott had seen the photos. He wasn’t convinced. But Mom believed the story like gospel.
The engine cut off with a triumphant cough and a rattle. A moment later, the driver’s side door creaked open and Mom emerged, radiant as always in her own eccentric, sun-kissed way. She had a large reusable shopping bag slung over one arm—the brown canvas kind with a mandala print and a faded patch that read Eat Like You Love the Earth.
Her reddish-blonde hair was twisted up into a loose bun held by what looked like a carved stick. She wore a flowy top, loose hemp pants, and hiking sandals that had probably seen every inch of Avila Beach at some point in their career. At 54, she was still lean, still light on her feet, and still exactly the kind of woman who could walk into a yoga retreat and be mistaken for a founding member.
She closed the door gently—always gentle, like the bus was a sacred relic—and made her way up the walk, beaming, bag in hand, ready to feed children and shift the spiritual balance of the household through snacks, intention, and small doses of cannabis. She walked into the house without knocking, using her own key. She was family.
The front door opened and Mom swept in with a gust of lavender and lemon balm, her bag thumping softly against her leg as she moved.
“Nana!” Katie shouted, launching herself from the living room rug like a missile.
Christopher was only half a second behind her.
“Oh, my sweet babies,” Mom crooned, dropping to her knees and gathering both of them into a full-body tangle of arms, curls, and long necklaces that smelled like incense and patchouli.
Katie giggled as Mom kissed the top of her head. Christopher wriggled a little under the squeeze, but didn’t pull away. She kissed his cheek anyway, then gave them both an extra squeeze for good measure.
“Did you bring snacks?” Katie asked, eyes hopeful.
“I did,” Mom said, pulling the shopping bag up to her chest like it contained a sacred offering. “But I need to sort them first to make sure my personal snacks aren’t mixed in with yours.”
Christopher tilted his head. “Like the kind that make you want to talk about the moon for a really long time?”
“Exactly,” she said, beaming. “Not for kids. Yours are full of vitamin C and ancestral love.”
Maggie, watching from the kitchen doorway, smiled to herself. The kids didn’t actually like the snacks—nobody liked her roasted kale and dried fruit and whatever weird-ass trail mix she was experimenting with that week—but they ate it anyway. Because they had a Nana. And she’d made it. And that was enough.
And to be fair, she also made the best sweet snacks in the world. Stoners always did. Her no-bake cocoa balls, agave granola bars, and maple cardamom crunchies were weirdly addictive—perfectly chewy, just sweet enough, and somehow exactly what you wanted, even if you didn’t know it.
Despite all her quirks—or maybe because of them—both kids loved her deeply.
Mom finally stood and turned toward the adults.
“Hi, Mom,” Scott said, stepping forward to kiss her cheek.
“Hey, Mom,” Maggie echoed, offering a warm squeeze.
She’d been calling her Mom since she and Scott had moved in together—at Mom’s insistence. And it hadn’t taken much insisting. Maggie had no relationship with her own mother, who had disowned her after she got pregnant with Christopher. Mom had offered to fill that space from the start, and Maggie had accepted it without hesitation. The name had stuck.
Mom couldn’t be dissuaded from the belief that Scott and Maggie were secretly in love. Not even the well-established fact of Maggie’s lesbianism could shake that conviction. In her mind, love was love, and the two of them were clearly soulmates—just waiting for the stars to align or a full moon on a Friday the 13th to unlock their destiny.
Maggie had stopped arguing about it. In truth, she’d never even started.
It was a ritual now—Scott and Maggie giving Mom five or ten minutes of real face time before the evening settled. She called it “calibrating the household energy.” Scott called it “preventing her from smudging the hallway with burning sage again.”
She dropped her shopping bag on the kitchen table, began unpacking jars and co-op bulk baggies and unlabeled tins like she was stocking an apothecary, and then turned with a grin.
“Oh!” she said, reaching into the side pocket of her purse. “Here it is.”
She pulled out a tiny zip-top bag, no bigger than a matchbook. Inside was a single soft orange gummy, shaped like a leaf. A red foil heart sticker sealed the baggie like it was Valentine’s Day in a dispensary.
“For Maggie’s friend,” Mom said cheerfully, handing it over.
Maggie accepted it with thanks.
“I’ll put it in the safe,” Scott said, already reaching for it.
“Thank you, honey,” Mom said.
Scott took the gummy and disappeared down the hallway with practiced efficiency.
The kids headed off next—Katie humming and Christopher pretending to grumble—as they both clomped toward their respective showers to get cleaned up before their traditional Friday movie night. Tonight’s feature: James and the Giant Peach, which had been Mom’s pick (of course).
That left just Maggie and Mom in the kitchen.
Mom reached into her woven shoulder bag and pulled out a small, velvet-covered box—roughly the size and shape of a jewelry case. She offered it up with both hands, like she was bestowing sacred relics.
“I brought you something,” she said.
Maggie took the box and opened it. Inside was a delicate-looking bracelet—copper-toned, inlaid with dark stones that shimmered faintly under the kitchen lights.
“They’re magnetic stones,” Mom explained. “Infused with natural polarity from the geographic north pole. If you wear it regularly on your right wrist, it can help realign your acupressure fields and stabilize your internal energies.”
Maggie smiled, already bracing for the drawer where this would eventually live, next to the detox earrings and the fluoride-absorbing toe rings. Still, she slid it over her wrist.
It fit perfectly. And ... actually ... it didn’t look bad at all.
“I love the way it looks on you,” Mom said, delighted. “Right wrist most of the time. But when Mother Nature starts approaching with her little monthly gift, shift it to the left. It helps ease the symptoms. Bloating, irritability, all that noise.”
Maggie nodded along. “That’s really cool. But I’ve got Western medicine covering that. My implant keeps me from having a period at all. No PMS, no bleeding, no lunar-cycle emotional carnage—just peace, as long as I remember to update it every three years.”
Mom’s eyes lit up. “You’re on birth control?”
“Sure am,” Maggie said. “Best medical decision I ever made.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Mom beamed. “Does this mean you’ve finally accepted that you and Scotty are soulmates? That your destiny is written in the stars and the book of Chakra?”
Maggie laughed. “I love Scotty more than I’ve ever loved anyone except Christopher, but we haven’t quite reached that level. Mostly because of the whole I only have sex with women thing.”
Mom waved a hand, unconcerned. “I went through a phase like that back during the buildup to the Iraq War. Negative energy everywhere. Misalignment of primary bio-drive energy. Dad was bummed, but my psyche eventually realigned once the general public accepted that it was an illegal war and began protesting against it.”
“Yeah,” Maggie said, seriously. “Not sure I’m realignment material.”
“But then why the birth control?” Mom asked, gently, curiously.
“Because,” Maggie said, “I get wicked, unpredictable periods when I’m off it. Like, truly brutal. Bloodbath, hormone spike, mood crash—total disaster. And since modern medicine offers a way to shut that shit off, I’m in. My doctor’s a sister lesbian. Very progressive. She believes all these women and men who think we’re supposed to suffer the ‘curse’ because some bitch ate an apple in a garden once are full of shit.”
Mom clapped her hands together, almost giddy. “Yes. That’s the kind of energy we need. I’m so proud of you. Claim your body, claim your peace.”
“I’m trying,” Maggie said. She looked down at the bracelet again. “What happens if I put it on the left wrist even though I don’t get periods?”
“I don’t know,” Mom said worriedly. “I don’t think you should mess with things we don’t understand.
As it turned out, Scott was unable to deliver the gummy in person. He had Mark Callahan to thank for that.
Their Thursday night shift had been mostly routine. A couple of domestic verbal calls—no bruises, just bruised egos and poor communication. Scott backed up a suspicious vehicle at the edge of a public park; turned out to be two teenagers vaping and trying to break up without crying. Maggie responded to a welfare check that turned out to be a guy sitting in his truck watching old motocross clips on YouTube and ignoring his ex-wife’s texts. Routine stuff.
They met for dinner around 1:00 AM at a cop friendly teriyaki place over by Highlands Park. Maggie got the spicy pork. Scott, as always, ordered the grilled chicken and said something about “trying to eat cleaner.” Maggie called him a poser and stole three of his gyoza.
By 3:00 AM, the streets had gone still. Most of the other Adam Watch units disappeared into their hidey holes—church lots, county service yards, that one industrial cul-de-sac with good cell signal and nobody around to call the sheriff on you for napping. No calls were pending. The radio was mostly silence.
Scott dozed for a bit behind the Baptist Church of the Nazarene on North Avenue, reclined in his seat, radio volume set to a notch above zero. Not real sleep, but close enough to shave the edge off.
At 5:00 AM, the day shift units started hitting the streets.
“Eighteen-Bravo is ten-eight from station.”
“Sixteen-Bravo, clear and available.”
“Twelve-Bravo ten-eight in District 1.”
Dispatch followed with the magic words: “All District 1 Adam Watch units are clear for end-of-watch.”
Scott sat up, cracked his neck, and put on his seatbelt.
He was already thinking about that first beer at The Chambers, sitting across from Maggie while she recapped something ridiculous from her shift and he did the same. Mom would handle school drop-off. He’d be home by 8:25. Lena would walk Ranger by at 8:30. The gummy was in the safe, everything locked in.
Then he drove into the smoke.
It hit him at the intersection of North and Elms—a greasy wall of exhaust thick enough to make his eyes sting. The smell of unburned fuel pushed into the Tahoe’s cabin before he could switch off the vents.
A few blocks later, he caught up to the source.
A black Ford Taurus—late ‘90s model, maybe a 2000—puttering eastbound like it had been dragged from a swamp and given just enough life to limp toward a suicide cliff to pass on its genes before a grateful self-sacrifice. It was hard to tell the original color through the dirt, but Scott was guessing it used to be black.
No rear plate. No working tail lights. One reverse light was stuck on. The car was doing thirty in a forty-five, swerving just slightly between the lane marker and the bike lane. The muffler looked like it had been partially reattached with a coat hanger and a prayer.
Scott sighed.
He could just pass him. Just go around and keep driving to the station. He was off in forty minutes and still had to put fuel in the Tahoe, unload all of his shit, and then gear down and put on his civvies. Nobody would blame him.
But this was too flagrant. Even for five in the morning.
He reached for the mic, thumbed the key, and said—with a sigh clearly audible and full of disgust to all that heard it, “Sixteen-Adam with a vehicle stop.”
“Sixteen-Adam, go ahead?” replied the dispatcher, surprised that an offgoing unit was initiating something.
“It’ll be at North and Kensington. Black Ford Taurus, late 90s or early 2000s, black, occupied times one, no plate.”
She repeated the information back and then asked for a unit to cover. Sixteen-Bravo, Frank Remford, one of the oncoming day shift units, volunteered for the task.
Ordinarily, Scott would’ve waited for dispatch to run the license plate before initiating a stop—standard rhythm. Get the return, see what kind of rabbit hole you might be about to step into.
But there was no plate.
Which made that step both impossible and unnecessary.
Instead, he stayed behind the Taurus for a few moments, letting his dash cam roll. The plume of smoke was thick enough to obscure low orbit. The complete lack of a rear plate was plainly visible—just a rusted, empty bracket and a line of holes where screws used to be. That would be important if this ended up in court. Probable cause was like body armor: always better to have it on record to close any loopholes before they could open.
After a long breath, he flipped on his overheads.
The red-and-blues flared against the grime-smeared back window. Nothing happened.
The Taurus kept creeping forward at its stately, fog-line-hugging thirty miles per hour like Scott wasn’t there. As if the driver thought Scott would just give up if he concluded the driver was unaware of his presence. Oh well. He doesn’t see me. I guess I can’t pull him over then. Bummer on me.
Scott gave it ten seconds.
Still nothing.
Then he gave the siren a pair of sharp, echoing yelps.
The Taurus flinched, weaved right, and finally rolled into the empty lot of a strip mall that had seen better decades. A darkened liquor store, a shuttered donut shop, and a massage parlor that definitely wasn’t operating under a licensed board of therapeutic ethics.
The car angled clumsily into a spot near the liquor store’s chain-gated door. The reverse light was still inexplicably on. The plume of smoke billowed upward and then drifted across the lot.
Scott pulled in behind him, offset slightly to the left.
He didn’t wait for Remford.
One occupant. One car. If it turned out to be something benign—and God, he hoped it was—he could cancel the cover, write a citation, or tell the guy to park the junker before it exploded, and then get on with his morning beer.
He popped the Tahoe’s door and stepped out, alert but loose. A practiced motion. Nothing theatrical.
The spotlight of the patrol vehicle was angled directly at the back of the Taurus, giving him cover and visual advantage. His hand rested casually on the butt of his gun, the back of his mind running through the standard branching flowchart of “what happens if...”
He approached the driver’s side, staying just far enough off the quarter panel to avoid a surprise door swing or a blind-side ambush. Sidestep forward. Watch the side mirror. Listen for movement. Feel the air. He shined his flashlight in the backseat, clearing it, and then into the front. He could not see the driver’s hands.
As he neared the back window, he called out, voice even:
“Put your hands on the steering wheel for me.”
The driver didn’t respond.
Scott continued a little further forward, but paused before committing to the approach. He bathed the inside of the car in light, looking at the occupant.
White male adult. Maybe thirty. Greasy, shoulder-length hair. Dirty hoodie. Slack jaw. Pockmarked cheeks. The exact human being you’d expect to see under the dictionary entry for tweaker.
Scott still couldn’t see his hands. He slid the gun out of his holster and hid it along his right thigh, index finger nestled against the trigger guard.
“Hands on the wheel,” he repeated. “Now.”
“Sorry, sorry!” the man blurted, moving so quickly to slap his hands down on the wheel that Scott instinctively had the gun half pointed at him before his mind was able to send the abort signal.
A little jolt of adrenaline shot through him as he slid the pistol back into his holster. He was already mad at the asshole for making him stop him in the first place. Now he was mad at him for scaring him too. Double mad.
Scott stepped a little closer, keeping his right hand on the grip of his holstered sidearm. His left swept the flashlight beam slowly across the interior, scanning for the usual signs—pipe, foil, needle, baggies, scales, burnt corners, cooked spoons. Nothing jumped out at him.
Just clutter. Chaos.
Food wrappers, crushed soda cans, two empty cigarette packs stuffed into the console, and what looked like at least two dozen loose butts scattered across the floorboards. The whole interior smelled like chain-smoked Mountain Dew and disappointment.
But nothing overtly illegal.
No probable cause to escalate.
That was good. Maybe the guy was just a disorganized shitshow with a blown exhaust and expired everything. Maybe this could be a quick cite and a boot off the road. Nothing more.
Scott let the silence hang a second, then said, “I’m Deputy Dover with the Sheriff’s Department. You got a license and registration on you?”
The man shook his head. “I ... uh ... forgot my wallet at my bitch’s house. I was gonna go get it later. And I’m, uh ... kinda between registrations right now.”
Scott sighed audibly.
“Between registrations?”
“Yeah. Like ... I registered it, but then I moved, and I think they sent the sticker to the wrong address.”
“But the whole license plate is missing,” Scott said. “Not just the sticker.”
“That’s what I mean,” he said. “The whole fuckin’ thing needs to be reregistered. But one of them motherfuckers at the DMV told me is was still okay to drive it like that because it was their fault and shit.”
“Really now?”
“Swear to God.”
Scott gave him a long look. “What’s your name, my friend?”
“Joe,” he said.
“Joe what?”
“Joe Smith.”
“Are you Mormon?”
“Huh?”
A sigh. “Never mind. What’s Joe short for?”
“Nothin’. Just Joe.”
“Just Joe? Your parents just named you Joe? Not Joseph or anything like that?”
“Just Joe.”
Scott took out his notebook and his pen. “Spell it for me.”
“J-O,” he said.
“No E?”
“No, Smith. Like I told you. Not Noei.”
“I mean you spell your first name—the name that is not short for Joseph—with a single J as in Juliette and a single O as in Oscar and no E as in Echo?”
“Oh ... right ... yeah.”
“Glad we cleared that up. And the spelling of your last name?”
“Smith,” he said. “S-M-E-T-H.”
Scott repeated that. Verified that it had an E as in Echo and not an I as in Ida. He then turned his full look of disbelief on the man.