Tuesday Tales: From the Word MACHINE

Welcome back to Tuesday Tales. This is the first Canadian long weekend of summer, and the weather sucks! It was so cold out that I needed my winter coat and gloves to go for my daily walk. Whatever is going on with Mother Nature must be serious. On a side note, my story, And Justice for All, takes place at this exact point in time, only in the story, the weather is hot and sticky like it was last year. What a difference a year makes! Our word prompt this week is MACHINE, but I’m using MACHINERY, a form of the word and I’m a few words over to complete the scene. Sorry about that! Enjoy!

“Damn it, Maggie. You’ve got it all wrong. I’m not using you to bait a trap. I’m trying to protect you,” Harry growled, slamming his fists against the steering wheel. “When I heard that the officer who’d been shot was you … Do you honestly think the RCMP would approve of me using either one of us like that? The government machinery doesn’t work that way, and neither do I. Beside, Morris would never have agreed to it. He called me on it before I left his office. I laid my cards out for him. He did say you wouldn’t be happy being protected, but dammit, I lost you once. It isn’t going to happen again.”

“I’m quite capable of protecting myself, thank you.” She sat up straighter, her green-gold eyes flashing fire. “As for losing me before, you can’t lose what you never really had or even wanted. So, if I’m not here to bait a trap, why am I here?”

Harry sighed. “This is the worst possible time for this discussion.”

“And yet, here we are.”

“Fine. We have eleven dead officers, and two survivors. The only one of those who was where she was supposed to be on the day of the attack was you. I wasn’t supposed to be working with Brent Singh the day we were ambushed. I’d been on vacation. I’d taken Jac and Liam to Disney World. I was in line to take over an investigation into foreign interference in the last election. Peter Malloy was Singh’s new partner. He had a family emergency, so since I was just kicking around, I filled in for him. Before you even ask, Malloy’s Irish Canadian, and no, he doesn’t fit the profile either, but then we’ve never looked into him. I will now. Does he have something in his background we didn’t suspect? As far as I know, he’s a bilingual Roman Catholic, but would that be enough to make him a target?” He hit the steering wheel again. “I’ve been playing catch-up with this since day one. Until today, I never considered that the reason I might be alive was specifically because I wasn’t Malloy. If Malloy was the target, then there was no bounty on me. As a rule, assassins don’t do freebies. The shot made me unable to defend myself, but had he wanted me dead, all it would’ve taken was a twenty-foot walk and a bullet between the eyes. So, let’s assume I’m alive because I’m the ideal, the Anglo-Saxon male Christian police officer who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. What’s your excuse? Why are you still alive?”

“Do you think I haven’t asked myself the same question?”

Don’t forget to check out the other Tuesday Tales.