Null Pointer
Loquacious Lumberings
August - Dan
August Crawl - 1,267 words
Write 400 words – 10:58.
Participate in a 15 minute word war – 406 words.
Write for 10 minutes – 276 words.
Write 150 words in 4 minutes– 2:49, winner.
Do a 3% challenge (Winner -50 words) – 1243 x 0.03 = 37.2 – 50 = -12.8 words.
1,267 words.
Dan smiled as he woke up. He’d had a good evening with Emma the night before. He felt serious about a woman for the first time in his life. Mart had started joking that Dan would never settle down. Jim understood that Dan was searching for his perfect. People like Trixie, Honey, and Di didn’t come along every day. But Dan had been clear from the day he arrived in Sleepyside what the score was where those three were concerned. He respected Mart, Brian, and Jim too much to fight them for one of the Bob-White ladies, though he might have been tempted in a different life.
He was grateful to the Bob-Whites for giving him a second chance at a first impression. His attitude when he arrived in Sleepyside had been exceptionally poor. He would always be grateful to Trixie for her tenacity and unwillingness to give up a mystery, because it had proved him innocent of Luke’s thefts. He was immensely indebted to Mr. Maypenny for welcoming him into his home and family when his own uncle wouldn’t or couldn’t. Dan had stopped trying to determine which it was. He supposed that meant he had forgiven his uncle. And he couldn’t even begin to quantify his debt to the juvenile court social worker who had spent hours of her own time and hundreds of her own dollars tracking down the family she was sure her troubled case had, and for her belief that he would turn around his life, given the chance.
He’d been given a second chance at life the likes of which he certainly never deserved, but he intended to make the absolute best of the one he’d gotten.
That included settling down with a lovely woman and making a home and a family with her. Someday. In the meantime, Dan had been enjoying his hunt for Ms. Perfect and the future Mrs. Mangan, but he would be the first to admit he was not working too hard at finding her, because the hunt was so much fun. That changed when he met Emma – or at least when he started dating her.
He’d first seen her when she came into the precinct as emotional support for a friend of hers who was a victim of domestic abuse. Dan had not been surprised by the friend’s accusations against her husband. No one in the precinct or the Sleepyside General Hospital was the least bit surprised by the accusations. They’d long suspected. The police officers had invoked mandatory arrest, and checked in repeatedly with the schools for any sign that the children were being abused. The schools reported apparently healthy, well-adjusted children. They’d tried to talk to them, but the mother wouldn’t consent to the police talking to her children without her and she assured the officers her children loved their father, to which they nodded along. The mother insisted all her bruises, cuts, sprains and the like were due to clumsiness. No one believed it, but when it went to court, it became he-said-she-said-cops-said, and the man walked, never in prison for more than a week at a time.
Finally, Emma had convinced her friend to tell the police the truth and to get her husband out of the house and away from the children. When the two women had come into the precinct in the middle of the morning, Dan’s first thought had been relief. He had wished for years that there had been more he could do for the woman. His second thought was an entirely clinical appreciation of Emma’s figure – the woman was hot and entirely his type. His third thought was the realization that it would be entirely unprofessional to hit on a battered woman’s emotional support.
It was a shame, but it was the job. He and Emma would cross paths frequently in the next several weeks and the case progressed, and then proceeded to trial, divorce, and custody hearings. He saw her in the precinct and ran into her in the courthouse. He smiled and exchanged pleasantries from time to time. He was friendly with everyone; nothing unprofessional about that.
Eventually the legal proceedings finished and Emma dropped out of his life. Until the Fourth of July parade. He’d run into her on the street. “Officer Mangan!”
“Dan. I’m off-duty, Ms. Longsten.”
“It’s Emma, Dan. I was never on-duty.”
“Are you enjoying the parade, Emma?”
“It’s more enjoyable with friends and Rachel and the kids went on a reality escape vacation,” Emma answered.
“Well, I can’t blame them for that. It’s been a long journey out for them.”
“It could have been a lot shorter.”
“I assure you, Sleepyside PD did everything it could for her.”
“It wasn’t an accusation, Officer Mangan. I know well the effort your department, the schools, and the hospital have made and been making for years in the hope of getting Rachel out. I meant it could have been a lot shorter if Rachel hadn’t resisted every offer of help.”
Dan nodded. “How did you convince her?”
“I didn’t. Her oldest, Dylan, did. He’s had to grow up fast, too fast.”
“He sounds like a good kid. He’ll make the most of it,” Dan had told her, thinking of Jim, Brian, and himself, all of whom had grown up faster than others might have had to.
“I hope so. Enjoy your Fourth!” With that they’d both wandered back into the crowds.
A few days later, he’d run into her during a grocery stop after a patrol. Another few days had her turning up at the bar when he and a few fellow officers went for drinks. That time he’d asked her out right, “How do you keep turning up everywhere I am?”
She’d blushed. “Not everywhere. I didn’t want to come across stalkerish.” She blushed again. “Look, Dan, I’m bad at this. You’re good looking, responsible—a cop—and seem to be a genuinely nice guy. One of the court officers who saw me watching you mentioned you were single.”
“So you’re asking me out to dinner?”
“I thought in this day and age, it was more common to start with drinks.”
“Hence the bar,” Dan said with a grin. “What the heck? You’re good looking, and seem to be a genuinely nice person. I know you’re a good friend to Rachel. You weren’t a victim, or a witness, or a suspect in any of my cases, so I think it’s okay to see where this leads.”
Drinks had led to dinner, had led to dinner, had led to drinks. The more he got to know Emma, the more he liked her. But he was still cautious. He’d made enough mistakes in his life to know how easy it was to make another. He’d certainly made them in his dating life, even if you didn’t count the drug addict an undercover cop had sent to him. In the cop’s defense, the man had thought she was ready to get clean and had known Dan would help her do that. The woman had believed the cover and had thought Dan was a dirty cop who would supply her when her old dealer cut off her line of credit. But she wasn’t the only mistake. There had been several woman of the variety a senior officer in the department had called “badge bunnies”, woman who had no interest in Daniel Mangan as a person, but liked the idea of dating a cop, or thought the badge and gun made him sexy. Dan didn’t think he needed the help, but he supposed he was biased.