Chapter 69

It was before my walk on day four of Janet’s recovery, when she decided to write again. She was going to do it no matter what I thought. That is when I knew she was ready to try it.

“Okay you can try it, but it may be a tough slog for a while. This is your chance to prove yourself. As long as you fight the good fight, I will not give up on you. But know now, I’m not married to you. I don’t need the money bad enough to take any shit from you. I walk three times a day and you will walk at least twice a day weather permitting.

Let me put it this way. If I walk you walk.” However I did make the little speech with a smile. “So you have ten minutes until this train leaves.” While she dressed, I went to the kitchen, there I drank the milk, and swallowed the morning pill cocktail, which was always my first move of the day.

Mikah wanted to get started, so I moved toward the rear of the house and shouted to Janet to move her ass.

“What would it hurt if we were ten minutes late leaving,” she asked seriously.

“It would be ten minutes today, twenty tomorrow, until we just stayed in bed all day. If it isn’t pouring rain, or some other serious situation, we walk. We even walk in the rain, now and then. So you need to work hard on that screen play. You can always rent the back room again,” I explained. “Like I said the first day. You walk in lieu of room and board.”

“Okay, okay I get it. I need to stop and get some coffee. I need caffeine,” Janet complained.

Since it wasn’t raining, Mikah and I hung out in the parking lot. Mikah sniffed at a car which drove in and parked near us. She quickly alerted me that there was a drug scent coming from it. I rubbed her on the neck and patted her on he head.

“Good girl,” I said. I also gave her a small treat. I kept a few of those in my pocket for times like the one that morning.

“You a cop,” the young man asked after he came out with a canned power drink in his hand.

“No, Mikah and I are both retired cops,” I said. “If you hit a police a traffic check, if I were you I would turn around and go another way.”

“Sounds like good advice thanks man,” He said.

Since he was alone, he didn’t have to impress anyone. He seemed like a good enough young man.

“You ought to call her Tripod.” he said pointing toward Mikah with his power drink can.

.

“She works too well for that,” I said with a smile. “She don’t know she is handicapped, She thinks she is still a bad ass.”

“I hope I’m like that, when I’m like the two of you.” He said like he was talking to his grand dad.

“If you truly want to be like us at this age, find a new line of work,” I said with a smile.

“Don’t know nothing else,” he said.

I gave him a card when Janet came out of the convenience store. “If you want to talk about it sometime, give me a call. I don’t work for anyone right now, so I’m not looking for anything. Call me we can arrange a meeting.” I didn’t expect him to call. We actually shook hands before he drove away.

“Who was that?” Janet asked.

“I got no idea,” I said. “Just an unnamed druggist.”

“That’s a nice way to put it,” she said.

“He seemed to be a nice enough young man,” I replied. “Enough chin wagging let’s go.”

“I see you’ve been watching those foreign Movies again,” she suggested,

“Guilty as charged. You do know I stopped drinking coffee this early in the morning,” I said.

“Just pour it out,” she suggested.

“Never going to happen,” I admitted.

“Good,” she replied as she walked away.

When the walk was over I took a shower, then dress for the day. When we were both clean and ready to greet the day, I suggested. “Let’s have our first real conference on episode three.”

“I’m good with that,” she said.

She sat down with her script on her small Dell portable combo pad and laptop. She read me the first scene. It was a scene with Tory meeting with one of her detective couples. I thought of them as Mr January and Miss June. So of course we worked that into the script with Jarrett calling them that, which meant it caught on instantly. Neither of them objected to the new nicknames. They both knew that they were the best looking detectives on the team.

“Listen you two, I’m going to sent you to talk the a sitting superior court judge. You need to charm him into signing a search warrant for a local businessman. The man owns the warehouse where we found the meth lab. We think he stores the raw product in another of his labs. We just don’t know which ones. He has three self-store warehouses. We just want to walk drug dogs through the aisles. The managers have the keys, so we could seize a lot of product. It would look good on our stats,” she said to the two of them. Instead of calling it over, I want you two to hand carry it over. Get the warrants back to me asap. I also don’t want any unnecessary eyes on them. Keep the chain tight,” Tory said.

The drug dogs that the state police used were trained differently than Mikah. She was a generation behind the new dogs. The new dogs didn’t react to pot at all. So when they did their thing, the cops had the managers open the doors. The cops went inside and did a search.

A script ran about twenty five pages per episode. We managed to rework five pages that first day. I changed a lot of the dialogue and had the cops move different ways when they did their jobs. I also make a big deal out of where they took their meals and the interactions between the teams. Each of the teams had to prove themselves to the others. Cops had to build trust in order survive in a closed group like the strike team. You might be a nerd, but you still had to be willing to take a bullet. The same was true for the pretty boy and his pinup partner. I made that abundantly clean in those first five pages of the scrip. We had two weeks scheduled to completely rework episode three. Since we were still developing relationships there was lots to do on the script.