In the Ground (David Wolf Book 14)

with a heavy backpack emerges from the jungle wall and into view in his scope.
“Shit. There’s a kid walking out of the jungle.”
Wolf tracks the child for a few more steps, then tracks back to the edge of the lush forest where two men are making shooing motions with their hands.
When Wolf tracks back to the kid the boy has disappeared, replaced by a girl with long clay-red hair and gangly limbs. The backpack is no longer earthen in color, but vibrant pink.
“Sir!” The voice in Wolf’s earpiece makes him flinch. “Sir!”
A bird-sized insect jumps from the grass and lands on his face. The pinpoint claws of the bug dig in.
The image of the girl bobs. Wolf cracks open his other eye and sees she is nearing the helicopter. One of the women standing in line to board is pointing at her, looking just as startled by her appearance as Wolf.
She is carrying a bright red pencil in her hand, thumb poised over the tip like it’s a detonator in her hand.
“Sir!”
Wolf squeezes the trigger and the gun kicks against his armpit.
Wolf snorted, choking on saliva. He sat up hard, slamming his skull against something hard.
“Shit.” He clasped both arms around his head as pain reverberated in his head.
“Are you okay?” Heather Patterson was bent over him, holding a pair of crutches in one hand, reaching out for him with the other.
His eyes fluttered open and he got his bearings. With his arm he wiped a stream of drool off his face, feeling the imprint of carpet on his skin. A dagger of pain stabbed between two of his lower vertebrae as he sat up.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yeah. What’s up?”
Patterson backed away and gave him some room to crawl out from under the edge of his desk and off the floor. When he slithered out of the cloth sleeping bag she turned away. “Geez.”
“Sorry,” he said, grabbing his Levi’s from his office chair and slipping them over his boxer shorts. “What time is it?”
“7:10.”
Damn, it was late. He rubbed his eyes, scanning her foot. It was wrapped with a flexible bandage.
“What’s the prognosis?”
“Sprained ankle,” she said. “Nothing broken.”
“That’s good.”
“Still hurts like hell. Why are you sleeping on the ground in your office?”
“Uh, just…catching up on emails and paperwork last night and it got late.”
She popped her eyebrows and looked at the pile of paper inside the wire basket marked “inbox” and the overflow stack next to it. The layers of reports and forms looked denser and taller than the sedimentary layers up in Glenwood Canyon.
“I see you made some good headway.”
He reached into a cabinet behind his desk, pulled out his overnight bag and dropped it onto his desk, sending a sheet fluttering to the floor.
Patterson picked it up and slapped it onto one of the stacks.
“Geez.” She thumbed one of the piles. “Wilson’s gone for two days and you’re this swamped? Wait. These are from last month. I thought Wilson was going to have a talk with you about the RS-10F reports.”
“He did.” Wolf dug through his overnight bag, finding the tube of toothpaste and toothbrush. When he looked up, Patterson had her mouth open and her eyebrows in the W-T-F position.
“I’m getting to them. And those are dated after the twentieth of last month, so they’re not late.”
She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it.
“What?” He pulled out his toothbrush and toothpaste.
“What exactly did Wilson tell you about the reports?”
Wolf screwed his face up in thought. The conversation with his undersheriff about various paperwork system implementations was nothing more than a garbled voicemail that replayed in his mind—most of the good stuff lost due to poor reception. “I remember something about the RS-10F reports, but the specifics are eluding me right now.”
She nodded slowly, patiently. “It’s just that waiting so long to do these specific reports is causing some backup in other departments.”
“Oh.” He looked past her, through the windows to the squad room. “Like what kind of backups, again?”
“Like, when you’re late on these reports—”
“But I’m not late.”
“Okay, yes. But, when you’re, I should say, pushing the deadline limits of the reports, that pushes the deadline limits of everyone below you for the things they need to do that rely on the completion of these reports. Does that make sense?”
“So the deadline is really for the last person in the chain,” Wolf said. “So shouldn’t my deadline be earlier?”
“That was precisely what Wilson was supposed to talk to you about. Pushing up your deadline on these. Right now there are four or five days a month where people are scrambling late nights to catch up.”
He stared at the reports. “Okay. Got it. I’ll get those done ASAP, thanks.”
She nodded. “Good. And I’ll send you an email with the updated deadline.”
“Great. Thanks.”
He pulled out his towel and tucked it under his arm. Patterson remained in front of him.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“We never got to talk about it yesterday,” she said. “You said that they didn’t like the budget?”
Wolf put down his stuff. “Oh yeah.” He turned around and stretched his arms overhead. The exterior window blinds were drawn up, letting in subdued light that reflected off the western wall of the valley. A white strip of fog clung to the pines, tendrils swirling off of them like spiderwebs in a breeze. “They balked at the Deputy Leadership Training Fund.”
“Helms balked at it.” Patterson said. It wasn’t a question.
Wolf turned around and nodded.
“The bastard,” she said. “He’s in town two years and he thinks he’s king shit of Rocky Points. Why? Because he’s the county accountant?”
“Treasurer.”
“Asshole.”
Wolf turned back to the window again and gazed outside, thinking of their push to train many of their staff. Back in March Wolf had witnessed the annual performance reviews for the first time sitting in the Sheriff’s office, which had given him access to all the results throughout the entire department.
Every year since the SBCSD resided in the new, larger building, every March something called a Three-sixty