I had just about made up my mind that sleep was inevitable when Sheriff Vrooman came through the door. How does he do it? It’s the same Automatic Caution Door that everyone else uses, but I swear it swung like saloon doors for him. All heads turned toward him when he walked in. An imaginary piano player let the music die out. Vrooman scanned the room and picked me out.

            “Finnegan,” snapped the Sheriff, coming toward me. “Outside, now, please.”

            “Yep,” I said, on my feet already, gathering my stuff. The ‘please’ was new. I eyed him up and down the same way he was eyeing me. Other than going prematurely gray at the temples, Vrooman hadn’t changed one bit. He was still the tall, lean, eagle-eyed nemesis of my misspent youth, the man who had had an uncanny ability to know exactly what kind of half-assed mayhem I was planning and could show up not before, not after, but right in the middle of my guerilla art projects, handcuffs on his belt, sometimes standing there for five or ten minutes, leaning against a tree and watching. On one memorable occasion he had taken quite a few pictures before my friends and I noticed he was there.

            Vrooman still looked like he could run a four-minute mile. In fact, I suddenly realized how young he must be. When we were in high school, he was the biggest authority figure around and scared us to death, but he must have been only in his early twenties when he was elected, straight off the plane from his tour of duty in Iraq, only five or six years older than me. He still dressed in a faded old blue work shirt and jeans, his sheriff star pinned to the breast pocket, his regulation gun belt slung low on his hips. It was the subject of many long detention hall discussions whether Vrooman dressed and acted to fit the part or had just found the role in life that fitted him perfectly. Or maybe he just capitalized on his eerie resemblance to a very young Clint Eastwood. Either way, it was working for him.

            Vrooman studied me right back, as if I were a crime scene he was going to be grilled about later in court, or one of my outstanding murals (if I may say so myself) that still graced the alleyways of the town of Finnegan. Most business owners left them in place. And they were a draw for business, for real. Artists came to see them from New York regularly. Those people can drink coffee like you wouldn’t believe.

            I suddenly realized I had just been gazing at Sheriff Vrooman like a stunned ox, as he might put it. If not some saltier and more colorful way that would still sting hours later and leave me staring at the mirror, trying to determine if I really was a cut-rate small town vandal instead of the cutting edge artist I thought I was. In fact, that still rankled all these years later.

            “Sorry,” I said, coming out of my reverie. “Haven’t had much sleep for a couple of days.”

             “Walk with me,” said Vrooman.

            I followed him outside into the beautiful summer evening. The air was cooling down at last and felt amazing. Moths fluttered around the parking lot lights and birds were chirping in the trees around the perimeter as they settled down for the night. Vrooman handed me a bag from McDonald’s, bless his heart, a Big Mac with cheese, large fries, and a soda, pure delicious sugar and caffeine. He watched while I wolfed it down.

            “Evicted a tenant, eh, Finn?”

            “Yessir,” I said. “Aunt Addie had sent him three notices for unpaid rent.”

            “Let us do the evictions. It’s dangerous.”

            “He had keys to her apartment,” I said. Vrooman’s face went grim, then thoughtful.

            “You didn’t know that going in,” he said, catching me, of course.

            “No,” I admitted.

            “I really wish you hadn’t put yourself on that guy’s radar,” said Vrooman, suddenly sounding completely unlike himself. He was staring out at the cars in the parking lot. I went cold inside. “There are things going on you don’t know anything about.”

            “Like what?”

            “Ongoing investigations. Can’t talk about it. Just…stay away from anyone who seems like trouble. Don’t get mixed up in anything that feels off. Don’t go down dark alleys alone. Be smart. If you can.”

            I was waiting for that dig. The hot delicious French fries really helped soften the blow.

            “How’s your aunt?”

            “Better now that she has fluids, thanks. Those copied keys…something’s missing from her kitchen,” I said, cudgeling my brains. I could not think what went in that spot on top of the fridge.

            “Show me the keys,” said Vrooman. I produced them. He examined the copies and held them up to the last horizontal rays of sunlight coming through the trees. “Hmm,” he said, which told me absolutely nothing. He handed them back.

            “Anything else?” I said. Vrooman gave me the wolfish grin that said he knew he’d gotten under my skin.

            “Watch for increased traffic out toward the highway, by the truck stop,” he said. It took me a minute to figure out what he was talking about. Running. I was always running those roads. Just thinking about that stretch of empty road out that way made my toes curl up with the urge to get out there. It would have to wait.

            “Thanks,” I said. I held up the crumpled food wrappers. “And thanks for this. Really.”

            “Keep your nose clean, Finn,” said Vrooman. “I mean it. Stay out of trouble. You have a way of finding it no matter what you do, but make an effort.”

            “Okay,” I said, bewildered. He stalked off to the brown sheriff’s department SUV before I could organize my thoughts. What was that? A warning? A threat? Both?

            Zenobia appeared in the Automatic Caution Door and waved me over.

            “They paged you,” she said. My heart started racketing along a mile a minute and the Big Mac threatened to reappear.