But the sheriff held her tongue. Since her first day as a rookie—1,574 days and counting—every call at any Rickreiner property had worked its way through some variation of these two showing up to interfere. It seemed as if the Rickreiners always expected more than just a break-in, were always girding for bigger and more complicated trouble. The sheriff wondered if what Oppo wrote was true: Kim Maybee’s suicide was homicide. Barry was a lowlife, but was he capable of murder? The young woman had been a girlfriend of Barry Rickreiner’s in his days as a boozer and a user, and his casting-off of the wrong friends anchored his redemption story.

Now the candidate exited his ride, hauling out a Big Gulp cup to spit into before saying something unfriendly into his phone. He had his mother’s exquisite body type—petite yet unbalanced—and lately, as if to get the Bad Axe ready for the sight of him in a sheriff’s uniform, he had begun dressing like a cable TV cowboy—but the runty one, she would like to tell him, trying to catch up on the short-legged horse.

“… enough of your bullshit, Sharice in Atlanta. Get your shit together or lose our business.”

The sheriff stared, always appalled. It was not among her official responsibilities to police fashion, but she could write some heavy tickets right now. Pigeon-toed men weighing under a buck-fifty should not wear flashy western boots. Chinless men should not decorate the problem with string ties. And flaunt your open-carry permit, she thought, go ahead, fine, but the black Gore-Tex thigh holster is bunching up your cowboy trousers and confusing the look. And real men did not cuss out the security system’s customer-service reps into their sparkly new iPhones.

“Hey, Ma, the idiots just called. False alarm.”

“What’s-her-face just told me.”

Barry drilled Skoal juice into his Big Gulp. Loyal Denise had attempted to demystify this pissant’s run for office with jokes withdrawn from her vast mental savings account.

How does a man decide when it’s appropriate to challenge a woman in power?

He looks in his pants. If he sees a penis, it’s time.

But in truth BARRY HER’s run for sheriff had been a while in the works: substance-abuse rehab (year one), tech-college law-enforcement training (years two and three), stints as a volunteer EMT and a part-time township police officer (years three and four). Somewhere during year three, he had ticked the family-man box by marrying a divorcée, Becky Rilke, with three prefab little ones.

“Are we gonna check the building, though?” he wondered, almost looking at Sheriff Kick on his way to read the mood of his mother.

Babette’s heavily made-up nose had popped out with fat jewels of perspiration. She needed air-conditioning, fast. “I think she can handle it from here. She’s at her best when nothing happened.”